Teaching & Learning Guide for: Contemporary Approaches to the Literature of the First World War: A Critical Survey

Abstract

Author's Introduction: This article provides an overview of recent critical approaches to the literature and culture of the First World War, which have been dominated by questions of canon formation, rooted in ongoing attempts to expand the notion of war literature beyond the poetry of upper-class junior officers on the Western Front. These expansions have incorporated literature by women, by rank-and-file soldiers, and by combatants from across the British Empire and former colonies, as well as bringing much ephemeral material – including journalism, reportage, propaganda, and political material – into the purview of literary and cultural critics. Approaches to reading this ‘new’ material, as well as the established works, have also changed in recent years, beginning with 1980s feminist criticism, to emphasize war literature's constructions of gender, class, sexuality, and national identity. A different but equally important developing strand in the criticism of war writing challenges its generic separation from the major literary movements of the early twentieth century, particularly experimental modernism. These approaches have long emphasized the importance of the war as a historical context for modernism; more recently, literary critics have demonstrated specific aesthetic and verbal overlaps between modernist works and the literature of the First World War. Author Recommends:: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1975]). Fussell's book remains the seminal work for studying the canonical literature by Sassoon, Graves, Owen, Rosenberg, Blunden et al. Although his subtitle privileges ‘memory’, Fussell's guiding concept is more accurately ‘irony’, particularly the ironic reversal of optimism (what he refers to as ‘the abridgement of hope’), which he sees as a characteristic mode for Great War literature. His study makes broad claims for the effect of the war on the culture of the twentieth century, but his field of study is notably narrow, focusing almost entirely on upper-class, young, male, volunteer officers. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: The Bodley Head, 1990). The later but similarly influential work by Samuel Hynes examines a wider variety of cultural responses to the war and shows that ironic or protesting attitudes coexisted and competed with more conservative or pro-war views. His study is perhaps most useful for its neat articulation of the ‘Myth’ of the war: the dominant Anglo-American narrative according to which the war was a futile undertaking conducted by stubborn, incompetent generals who freely squandered the lives of the young soldiers. James Campbell, ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’, New Literary History 30.1 (1999): 203–15. Campbell's article was one of the first efforts to address the hierarchy of the canon of war writing, and its separation from the literary mainstream. He argues that critics of war literature have automatically sympathized with the soldier-poets’ position that only combatants can understand war and have the right to comment on it: a position that has been instrumental in excluding other voices. He makes a compelling case for the need for critics to scrutinize the political assumptions and consequences of their literary judgments. Catherine Reilly, Scars Upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War (London: Virago Press, 1981). Critical reconsideration of the meaning of ‘war literature’ and the First World War canon is tightly bound up with the production of anthologies: what poetry is available to readers, and how it is organized, has an important influence on critical trends. This influence is perhaps clearest in the explosion of feminist critical studies of war poetry and prose that followed in the wake of Catherine Reilly's bibliography of women's war poetry and her anthology Scars Upon My Heart. Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914–1964 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). At first, critical studies of women's literature and war experience were shadowed by Fussell, and worked to expand his narrow focus rather than engage theoretically with his argument. Although the title of Claire M. Tylee's The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914–1964 consciously echoes the broad scope of Fussell's famous formula, and implicitly critiques his conflation of ‘modern’ with ‘masculine’ memory, her study aims primarily to bring unfamiliar and forgotten work by women into critical view. Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Following Tylee and over two decades of subsequent studies of women's war writing, Janet S. K. Watson's Fighting Different Wars continues the trend in First World War literary criticism toward emphasizing the diversity of the war experience. Watson's study questions the over-emphasis on gender divisions in the criticism, by exploring the variety of responses to the war among different groups organized by different war experiences. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The historian Jay Winter has long been concerned with the need for a sustained comparative approach to the war, and his work has repeatedly challenged the narrowly national focus of most First World War history, as well as directing critical attention towards various popular, folk responses to the war across Europe. His influential Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning examines the role of different kinds of memorials and literary works as efforts to help individuals and nations heal – a compassionate approach that challenges the Myth's focus on bitterness, anger, and irony. Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). The dominance of a cultural-history approach that reads war literature primarily as documentary evidence has made literary critics reluctant to include it in their studies of contemporaneous modernist texts. Increasingly, however, critics have read modernism in the light of the war, following Trudi Tate's Modernism, History and the First World War, one of the first recent studies to note that modernism's ‘place in the history if its own time has received surprisingly little attention’ (2), and to examine how the particular historical circumstances of the war affected those who were living and writing through it. Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Closer attention is also now being paid to the overlap in aesthetic technique between modernism and war literature, particularly in the fragmentation of narrative; Allyson Booth's Postcards from the Trenches moves beyond broad historical or ideological relationships between the war and modernism as a movement, to make specific linguistic and formal connections between texts. She argues that the way the war experience was mediated and distorted through official language, in particular, became constitutive of modernism. Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Vincent Sherry's Great War and the Language of Modernism continues Booth's insight with a sustained account of the linguistic exchange between the language of war and the experimental voices of modernist literature. Online Materials:: http://www.iwm.org.uk. Imperial War Museum. This is an essential first stop for First World War research, particularly from the British perspective. The site continues to grow as the museum digitizes its extensive holdings of photographs, manuscripts, printed material, and film clips. The site also offers information on the museum's history and special exhibitions as well as teaching and research guides. http://www.awm.gov.au/. The Australian War Memorial. The Australian War Memorial offers similar resources from a different national perspective. http://wwi.lib.byu.edu. The World War One Document Archive. A wiki hosted by Brigham Young University Library, contains links to numerous historical and literary documents including official treaties organized by year, diaries and memoirs, image library, and links to other sites. http://www.firstworldwar.com and http://www.aftermathww1.com. Two amateur sites, Michael Duffy's First World War.com and Mike Roden's Aftermath offer a rich variety of historical and literary sources aimed at general readers, on, respectively, the war itself and its official commemoration. http://www.cwgc.org. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission. This Web site allows users to search its database to locate the graves of relatives; it also provides a detailed history of the Commission with accompanying images, and video and audio clips of remembrance ceremonies at its cemeteries. http://beck.library.emory.edu/greatwar/index.html. The Great War 1914–1918. This is a small, focused collection of out-of-print wartime poetry and postcards held by Emory University library. http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/blackadder/episodes/four/four_goodbyee.shtml. Blackadder Goes Forth. The final episode of the 1989 British comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth is an excellent popular evocation of the Myth of the war as Hynes formulated it. Extracts from this episode are sometimes available online e.g. http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Blackadder+Goes+Forth+-+Goodbyeee&emb=0#. Sample Syllabus:: War Poetry Anthologies: Creating and Challenging the First World War Literary Canon. Overview:. This course pairs anthologies of First World War poetry with critical works, in order to uncover the enduring connections between what is read and how in the formation of a literary canon. Although the course focuses on the literature of the war, this is not solely, or even primarily, a course about the First World War, but one which encourages students to focus on the publication, circulation, and packaging of literary works as well as their content. We will study editors’ introductions and prefaces to question how far an anthology is promoting a particular interpretation of the genre as a whole, and consider how anthologies in general should be understood: are they simply useful vessels for the circulation of diverse material, or do their inclusions and exclusions teach us about artistic value? Following a chronological structure, each week we will read selections from anthologies alongside critical material that engages with the anthology's particular construction of the canon as a whole or in part, and see what changes over the years in selection, arrangement, and interpretation. Readings:. The course reader will provide the preface, contents page, and representative selections from each anthology, along with a selection of critical readings. Further material, including cover artwork, will be available on the course Web site. Week 1: Introduction. Joanna Scutts, ‘Contemporary Approaches to the Literature of the First World War: A Critical Survey’, Literature Compass 3/4 (2006): 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00349.x.