Product Description

The Great War of 1914–1918 marks a turning point in modern history and culture. This Companion offers critical overviews of the major literary genres and social contexts that define the study of the literatures produced by the First World War. The volume comprises original essays by distinguished scholars of international reputation, who examine the impact of the war on various national literatures, principally Great Britain, Germany, France and the United States, before addressing the way the war affected Modernism, the European avant-garde, film, women’s writing, memoirs, and of course the war poets. It concludes by addressing the legacy of the war for twentieth-century literature. The Companion offers readers a chronology of key events and publication dates covering the years leading up to and including the war, and ends with a current bibliography of further reading organised by chapter topics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194256 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 348 pages

Review
'With its up-to-date scholarship, this book would be a very useful acquisition for serious research into the literature of the period, for undergraduate level-students and beyond.' Reference Reviews

'This outstanding volume is a welcome corrective to tired truisms surrounding Great War history, culture, and literature. Vincent Sherry's introduction argues for a literary history more attuned to the Zeitgeist of the war's early days … Sherry and his collaborators graciously acknowledge the primacy of these tropes in our cultural memory but also demonstrate new ways of reading and teaching literary representations of the Great War.' Yearbook of English Studies

About the Author
Vincent Sherry is Pierce Butler Professor of English at Tulane University, and author of The Great War and the Language of Modernism.

Customer Reviews

Quite disappointed
Probably I expected too much, but this Companion to WWI literature was a disappointment. One thinks that what comes from Cambridge is always top quality scholarship, but this reads more as a sometime shallow textbook for undergraduate courses. Most of it is stuff that could be already find on the books by the classic critics of W.W.I lit, such as Bergonzi or Fussell; some of the contributions seems to have been written by people who were not knowledgeable with this topic. Another weak point of the Companion is that it fails in tackling the phenomenon of Great War literature as a Euro-American phenomenon: its perspective is absolutely Anglo-centric, and this weakens the intellectual impact of the book. But I might be wrong in expecting too much, and this collection of essays is no more than a didactic instrument aimed at not-very-bright undergrad students.