Product Description

The year 2000 marks the 25th anniversary of one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Fussell illuminates a war that changed a generation and revolutionised 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. It 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 stirring experience of his research at the Imperial War Museum's Department of Documents. Fussell includes a new Suggested Further Reading List.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11364 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
...a model of intelligence and fine writing that will remain a key text in our culture for decades to come John Keegan, The London Review of Books, Vol 29, No 5 ...one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time Lionel Trilling, The London Review of Books, Volume 29, No 5

This book made a stir when it first came out in 1976. The author, a literary and social historian, looks at the impact of World War I on English and American literature. He moves from the enthusiasms of Rupert Brooke to the harsher realities of Sassoon and Graves, and goes on to show how notions and images of war have coloured common speech and imaginative writing down to the age of Amis and Heller. An interesting, though occasionally a maddening book. (Kirkus UK)

New inroads into an area of literary history partly probed by Bernard Bergonzi's Heroes' Twilight (1966). If you want an encyclopedic survey of WW I in the annals of English literature, you'll have to wait; Fussell (best known as an Augustan specialist) adopts a selective approach that deliberately leaves large areas in shadow. His chief focus is the experience of combat itself - the stinking hell of the trenches - as an event which necessitated a jolting transformation of past literary concerns and methods. The gap between patriotic expectation and bloody reality dealt the national consciousness a shock that is still being felt. The literary repercussions were muted and delayed by the fact that the major talents of the age either escaped first-hand combat or failed to survive it. Only lesser figures lived to record the obscenities they had undergone, and it took the post-WW II American novelists (Mailer, Heller, Pynchon) to consummate a tradition founded in the murderous absurdities of the Somme and Passchendaele. A promising thesis, pursued with much feeling, but the method is rather spotty. Fussell considers only Sassoon's George Sherston series and does so in terms of the "us-them" dichotomy of the combat situation and its mental residue. For David Jones there is "myth" (here, the ritualizing patterns which the mind tends to impose on all experience under unbearable stress); for Robert Graves, "theater" (self-conscious participation in "absurd costume drama"); for Wilfred Owen, the "homoerotic tradition." Curiously, Fussell's tracing of literary sources and influences often seems a jarring and schoolboyish trivialization of the material; his close readings frequently make heavy weather of rather glib points. His approach leaves out a great deal (e.g., the literature of pacifism; and it's a pity that he includes a few German authors but not Celine). Still, the subject is immensely important, and Fussell - best when examining the memoirs of half-anonymous survivors - opens up challenging lines of inquiry into what he calls, in Northrop Frye's words, a piece of "our own buried life." (Kirkus Reviews)

Review
...a model of intelligence and fine writing that will remain a key text in our culture for decades to come (John Keegan, The London Review of Books, Vol 29, No 5 )

...one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time (Lionel Trilling, The London Review of Books, Volume 29, No 5 )

Synopsis
The year 2000 marks the 25th anniversary of one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Fussell illuminates a war that changed a generation and revolutionised 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. It 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 stirring experience of his research at the Imperial War Museum's Department of Documents.

Fussell includes a new Suggested Further Reading List.

Customer Reviews

A bit outworn, but always a classic
The study of war literature does not end with Fussell. Things went on in the Anglospeaking world and elsewhere. Now there are many essays on war and literature, some with sounder judgements on single authors and books, though probably not as well written as The Great War and Modern Memory. However, no one can deny the simple fact that we wouldn't be discussing the issue of war and literature hadn't Fussell published this essay in the 1970s.

Having said that, I'd like to point out what aspects of the book are dated, since other readers have listed its merits.

First of all, the purely British canon Fussell analysed led him to some conclusions which are highly questionable when one takes into account the French, Italian, German, American, and Austrian classics of W.W.I literature. Let me say it clearly: an essay on the Great War and how it is remembered which does not take into account Remarque, Barbusse, Hemingway, and Lussu, is definitely too parochial.

Second: the idea that only "plain" narratives are faithful to the experience of fighters is definitely naive. Hence Fussell's bashing of David Jones, who wrote one of the most fascinating war novels (In Parenthesis), and possibly his decision to ignore the Americans (Hemingway, Dos Passos, and cummings being probably a tad too modernist to his taste).

Third: sometimes Fussell's use of Frye is persuasive, sometime it seems a bit stretched. To me Frye remains one of the great critical minds of the 20th century, whatever the bigots of po-mo in US campuses may preach; but the idea that irony explains everything written in this century, and that the main source of this ironic mood/mode is the Great War is a bit too
simplistic.

This doesn't mean I consider The Great War and Modern Memory unworthy of attention. It remains a must-read for all those who want to understand British W.W.I fiction and poetry. But it should not be read as an explanation of what W.W.I really was, and it should be read with other, more up-to-date books, like A.D. Harvey's excellent A Muse of Fire, who also works on non-British texts and offers a much wider and persuasive map of the relationship between war(s), literature, and the arts.

A masterpiece of military literatiure
First published in 1975, "The Great War And Modern Memory," is a study of the influence of the literature of the Great War on modern perception. Fussell limits his study to the familiar image of trench warfare, intentionally neglecting the Navy, Cavalry and the Royal Flying Corps. He also concentrates solely on the British experience, which is unusual and refreshing for an American author.

Fussell proposes a valid rationale for the limitations he imposes, (apart from keeping the study at a manageable size,) that is, the majority of Great War literature is British and generally a product of the trench experience. The breadth of source material used is huge, encompassing everything from the memoirs and dispatches of Haig and Plummer down to the personal diaries of private soldiers. He quite rightly concentrates on the great literary works, making continual comparison to Blunden, Graves and Sassoon. His synopsis of "The Memoirs Of George Sherston," manages to be both succinct and complete. As well as prose he analyses a great deal of poetry including large sections on Owen and Jones.

Whilst the book purports to concentrate on the influence of Great War literature on the modern, Fussell spends as much, if not more time, comparing the literature to the actuality of the experience. The central thread is the irony of the situation, whether it be Blunden comparing the pastoral beauty of the sky to the desolation of the battlefield below, or Graves comparing the comic moments in the trenches to the horror all around. He does, however, also achieve his objective, showing how numerous facets of modern life have been influenced by the literature and specifically how numerous literary works rely on Great War literature. Whilst this is generally well constructed, he could be accused of falling into a kind of literary American isolationism with continual reference to "Catch 22."

Fussell's book is an incredibly well researched and thought provoking study. Perhaps its' most impressive achievements are the questions that it presents in the mind of the reader. In the chapter entitled "Myth, Ritual and Romance," Fussell looks at the literature that influenced the soldiers of the Great War and finds that the voracious appetite for literature at the time had a marked influence on the memoirs and letters of the war and is what leaves a legacy of work of such quality. This begs the question; what would be the standard today with the reduction in quantity and quality of reading? He also shows how literature gave the soldier something to relate his experiences to, a good example being Bunyan's "A Pilgrim's Progress." What would fulfil that role today, paperback novels, television, computer games?

Although now 25 years old and appearing at times to be somewhat dated, Fussell's book is still extremely relevant. In the world of military literature it is a unique book, challenging the modern soldier to relate the literature he reads to his experiences and the experience of those who have gone before.

If mere words could cope...
To this day the Great War has remained as unnerving and far-reaching an experience as mankind has ever faced. In its course, writers, artists and historians strove understandably to mould and, in so doing, cope with, its shattering realities. The starting-point of Fussell's study bears a striking resemblance with two IWM pictures featured on opposite pages in his book: one of a neat row of officers inspecting model trenches at a military school, the other an eloquent testimony to the harsh realities of the 'Troglodyte' hell on the Somme.

Drawing amply from his knowledge of such major war chroniclers as Blunden, Graves, Hardy, Jones, Owen, Reed and Sassoon, Fussell's admirable study does just that: ultimately his work aims at tracing the manifold shapes the literary rendering of that sheer inferno took on through the years. Particularly enthralling reading are the chapters devoted to myth, ritual and romance, where the attentive reader may perceive a thread to Freud or Jung's collective unconscious. Moreover, the author dwells on two conflicting interests. The one of army leaders, on the one hand, - who must have approved of the use of high diction and euphemism as much as they applied censorship in the average subaltern's letters home - and the dysphemism of the likes of Owen and Sassoon as they were forced to follow its devastating wake on the other. Another topic which aroused our interest, was the discussion of the loss of a 'youth unscathed', as Fussell dubs it; of transcended emotions bordering upon homoeroticism, of men (and artists) dependent on each other in the face of the inevitable.

Finally, it is the author's defendable view that only in retrospect would a coherent, let alone, ironic, view of the wartime experience come to the fore. It must have been human nature that the artist's recording eyes fixed on phenomena utterly beyond description must have attempted in the first place to force, or enable him to come to terms with the memory in the aftermath.

The Great War and Modern Memory will not cease to inspire any student of the literary war experience, and at any level. As one turns the pages, one is aware of just how much this book deserves the merits it has been credited with so lavishly.