The Effects of the Great War on Literature and Poetry
Peter Krynicki
them all, and none, with the exception of the Eckstein's book, is
about the war, per se. They all deal with the effect of the war on
artists who expirienced the war, even on a peripheral level. Two deal
with the same topic, but use Vietnam as the war. And one, the
Cottington, is simply about Cubism pre-war, but has an interesting
essay - Picasso's Cubist War. The Sherry book is almost unreadable.
The best, IMO, are the Fussell, the Ecksteins and the Hynes. (After
reading the Hynes book I emailed him at Princeton to tell him how much
I enjoyed his book and asked him if he knoew of others like it. He
replied and invited me to his house. He was a fighter pilot in the
Pacific in WWII and writes about the effect of war on art, and gave me
four other books. One was the Sherry. Hmmmm?) l
1. Aichinger, Peter, The American Soldier in Fiction: 1880-1963.
2. Aldridge, John, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the
Writers of Two Wars
3. Beidler, Phillip, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam
4. Bergonzi, Bernard, Hero's Twilight: A Study of the Literature of
the Great War
5. Booth, Allysin, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space
Between Modernism and the First World War
The unprecedented magnitude of death during World War I forever
altered how people perceived their world and how they represented
those perceptions. In Postcards from the Trenches, Allyson Booth
traces the complex relationship between British Great War culture and
modernist writings. She shows that, through the experience of the
Great War, both civilian and combatant modernist writers found that
language could no longer represent experience. She goes on to identify
and contextualize several of the resulting modernist tropes: she links
the disolving modernist self to soldiers' familiarity with corpses,
the modernist mistrust of factuality to the apparant inaccessibility
of facts regarding the "rape of Belgium," and the modernist interest
in multiple viewpoints to the singularity of perspective with which
generals studied battlefield maps. Though her emphasis is on literary
works by Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, and Vera Brittain, among others,
Booth's analysis extends to memorials, posters, and architecture of
the Great War. This interdisciplinary quality of Booth's study results
in a much deeper understanding of how the Great War affected cultural
representations and how that culture represented the War.
6. Colby, Evelyn, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World
War Narratives.
Focusing on both documentary and fictional First World War narratives,
Cobley (English, U. of Victoria, B.C.) shows how the rhetorical,
narrative, and generic conventions of the literature act as carriers
of ideological meaning, and how the critique this literature offers
remains to a large extent complicit with the war it ostensibly opposes
7. Cooperman, Stanley, World War I and the American Novel
8. Cottington, David, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and
Politics in Paris, 1905-1914
An examination of the cubist movement set within the political,
economic, and cultural forces of pre-World War I France. Cottington
contends that cubism is a contradictory and unstable constellation of
interests and practices shaped by social and political forces
9. Cruickshank, John, Variations of Catastrophe: Some French Responses
to the Great War
10. Ecksteins, Modris, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of
the Modern Age
Dazzling in its originality, witty and perceptive in unearthing
patterns of behavior that history has erased, RITES OF SPRING probes
the origins, the impact, and the aftermath of World War I -- from the
premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the
death of Hitler in 1945. "The Great War," as Modris Eksteins writes,
"was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole.
The urge to create and the urge to destroy had changed places." In
this "bold and fertile book" (Atlantic Monthly), Eksteins goes on to
chart the seismic shifts in human consciousness brought about by this
great cataclysm through the lives and words of ordinary people, works
of literature, and such events as Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and
the publication of the first modern bestseller, ALL QUIET ON THE
WESTERN FRONT. RITES OF SPRING is a remarkable and rare work, a
cultural history that redefines the way we look at our past and toward
our future.
11. Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory
The year 2000 marks the 25th anniversary of Paul Fussell's work on the
war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the
world. He explores the British experience on the western Front from
1914 to 1918, focusing on the various literary means by which it has
been remembered, conventionalized and mythologized. The text is also
about the literary dimensions of the experience itself. Fussell
supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for writers who have most
effectively memorialized the Great War as an historical experience
with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning. These writers
include the classic memoirists Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and
Edmund Blunden, and poets David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred
Owen. In his new introduction Fussell discusses the critical responses
to his work, the authors and works that inspired his own writing, and
the elements which influence our understanding and memory of war.
Fussell also shares the experience of his research at the Imperial War
Museum's Department of Documents and includes a new suggested further
reading list
12. Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined: The First World War and English
Culture
According to Hynes ( The Auden Generation ), WW I engendered a sense
of idealism betrayed, turned high-mindedness into cynicism and gave
rise to resentment of politicians as the conviction emerged that the
war was meaningless, fought for no good cause. Calling this cluster of
attitudes the "Myth of the War," Hynes shows how these received views,
filtered through the '30s generation of Auden, Orwell, Waugh and
Greene, became "the truth about war." In this splendid study, the
Princeton professor of literature draws on novels, poems, films,
plays, paintings, music and diaries to show how WW I fostered radical
discontinuity with the past, an upsurge in images of violence and
cruelty, and the alienation of a "lost generation"; and intensified
pacificist and women's rights activism. Photos
13. Jones, Peter, War and the Novelist; Appraising the American War
Novelist
14. Klein, Holger (ed), The First World War in Fiction: A Collection
of Critical Essays
15. Mackaman, Douglas, World War I and the Cultures of Modernity
16. Meyers, Thomas, Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam
This study is a qualitative assessment within a group of five modes -
realism, the classical memoir, black humour, revised romanticism, and
mnemonic narrative - of the most important novels and memoirs written
by Americans about Vietnam. Among numerous works discussed are Philip
Caputo's A Rumor of War , John Delvecchio's The 13th Valley , David
Halberstam's One Very Hot Day , Michael Herr's Dispatches , and Tim
O'Brien's Going After Cacciato .
17. Norris, Margot, Writing War in the Twentieth Century
The twentieth century will be remembered for great innovation in two
particular areas: art and culture, and technological advancement. Much
of its prodigious technical inventiveness, however, was pressed into
service in the conduct of warfare. Why, asks Margot Norris, did
violence and suffering on such an immense scale fail to arouse
artistic and cultural expressions powerful enough to prevent the
recurrence of these horrors? Why was art not more successful--through
its use of dramatic, emotionally charged material, its ability to stir
imagination and arouse empathy and outrage--in producing an
alternative to the military logic that legitimates war?
Choosing works that have become representative of their historically
violent moment, Norris explores not only their aesthetic strategies
and perspectives but also the nature of the power they wield and the
ethical engagements they enable or impede. She begins by mapping the
altered ethical terrain of modern technological warfare, with its
increasing targeting of civilian populations for destruction. She then
proceeds historically with chapters on the trench poetry and modernist
poetry of World War I, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Erich Maria
Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, both the book and the film
of Schindler's List, the conflicting historical stories of the
Manhattan Project, a comparison of American and Japanese accounts of
Hiroshima, Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, and the effects
of press censorship in the Persian Gulf War.
18. Onions, John, English Fiction and Drama of the Great War
19. Quinn, Patrick J (ed)., The Literature of the Great War
Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory
This definitive volume will alter our understanding of the literature
of World War I. New critical approaches have, over the last two
decades, redefined the term "war literature" and its cultural legacy.
Consisting, in equal measure, of essays by male and female scholars
(from several different countries), and devoted to both familiar and
lesser-known works, this book presents the many faces of Great War
literary study at the millennium
20. Sherry, Vincent, The Great War and the Language of Modernism
With the expressions ""Lost Generation"" and ""The Men of 1914,"" the
major authors of modernism designated the overwhelming effect the
First World War exerted on their era. Literary critics have long
employed the same phrases in an attempt to place a radically
experimental, specifically modernist writing in its formative,
historical setting. What real basis did that Great War provide for the
verbal inventiveness of modernist poetry and fiction? Does the
literature we bring under this heading respond directly to that
provocation, and, if so, what historical memories or revelations can
be heard to stir in these words? Vincent Sherry reopens these long
unanswered questions by focusing attention on the public culture of
the English war
Peter Krynicki
Plainsboro, New Jersey
bar...@cix.compulink.co.uk
peter_k...@MSN.COM (Peter Krynicki) wrote:
> I have not read all of these and cannot even find a decent review for
> them all
Interesting list - thanks for taking the time to post it. I suppose the
difficulty with this field of study is knowing where to draw the line. In
French, German, British lit at least - perhaps less so in the US - it's
almost impossible for any work in the period immediately following WWI
/not/ to be 'about' the war on some level. Perhaps that applies more to
WWII in the US (or to the Civil War)?