The great war and post-modern memory : the first world war in contemporary british fiction (1985-2000)
(2009)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Latré, Guido
- Abstract
- (en) The First World War has never completely disappeared from the British collective memory since the end of the conflict, but it has especially gained in importance again in the late 1980s and 1990s, both in academia and beyond. The last two decades of the last century indeed saw an explosion in historical writing about the First World War, but also in popular representations. There now exist in Great Britain two main distinct perceptions of the First World War, and their coexistence is seen by some military and political historians in terms of a war of representations that opposes two ?Western Fronts?, that of literature and popular culture against that of history. While the latter strives to discover and transmit the ?truth? about the past, the former are said to perpetuate what has been called the ?myth? of the Great War, understood as an emotionally driven and ?false? version of the war. This doctoral dissertation examines fourteen British novels and short stories that were published during the late-twentieth-century ?war books boom,? and primarily aims at examining these severe claims of ?mythicality,? ?ahistoricity,? and lack of creative imagination. It seeks to establish in what forms, to what purposes, and with what effects the First World War has returned in contemporary British fiction. The first part investigates the allegations laid against contemporary WWI fiction by military historians. Chapter 1 first defines the multifaceted term ?myth? and looks at the special place it holds in human thought as a foundational story of origins; it also explains how the historical event of the First World War has become part of the British national mythology. Chapter 2 describes the four main elements of the mythical scenario of the Great War (viz. horror, death, futility, and incompetent generalship). It examines how they have shaped the works under scrutiny; it also shows how these writers have attempted to reach beyond the language and imagery handed down by the war poets by telling the ?unspoken stories? of the war and rewriting women and the working class back into the postmodern memory of the conflict. Chapter 3 looks at the intertextual dialogue that contemporary WWI writers establish with their poetic forefathers. The second and third parts focus on the recourse to, and conceptualization of, ?memory? in contemporary re-imaginings of the First World War. Part Two looks at ?shell shock? as the legacy of the war: memory is usually problematized as trauma, as an overwhelming, violent event that has been found impossible to deal with and that therefore lingers, unresolved, in individual and collective memory. Chapter 4 contextualizes the rise of shell shock as a fundamental element in the myth of the war and provides a theoretical framework to the close reading of five novels (i.e. Pat Barker?s Regeneration trilogy and Another World, as well as Robert Edric?s In Desolate Heaven) that follows in Chapters 5 and 6. These two chapters show how the five selected trauma narratives engage with the contemporary fears of the revenant quality of the past and the possibility of a contagious, transgenerational transmission of trauma. They also raise questions concerning the politics of memory, the adequacy of historical narrative, and the ethics of historical representation. Part Three investigates the questions of remembrance and the duty of memory, which are problematized in all the works under scrutiny. Most contemporary WWI narratives have placed the war in the wider perspective of the century, demonstrating their awareness of their posthistorical situation. Chapter 7 examines the fear that the past is in danger and should be rescued from the work of time and history. Chapter 8 shows how this rescue of the past takes the form of a detective investigation, a metaphor of memory which brings to the fore the agency of memory as process and the inherent textuality of the past, and thus questions the possibility of ever knowing the war...
- Affiliations
Citations
Renard, V. (2009). The great war and post-modern memory : the first world war in contemporary british fiction (1985-2000). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/78094