The Great War and Modern Memory
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 First edition | |
| Author | Paul Fussell |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary criticism |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Publication date | 1975 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | 0-19-513331-5 |
The Great War and Modern Memory is a book of literary criticism written by Paul Fussell and published in 1975 by Oxford University Press. It describes the literary responses by English participants in World War I to their experiences of combat, particularly in trench warfare. Fussell describes how the collective experience of the "Great War" was correlated with, and to some extent underlain by, an enduring shift in the worldview of individuals, from the tropes that had guided writers before the war to the harsher themes that came to be dominant during the war and after.[1]
Fussell's criticism crosses genre boundaries, attempting to describe how the experience of the war forced them to share a common atmosphere in their essays, letters home, novels, humor, and poetry. The work of Northrop Frye is a powerful influence on Fussell's analysis of how the experience of the war altered the way they and their peers responded to the prewar world. Fussell later commented:
Also, I was very interested in the Great War, as it was called then, because it was the initial twentieth-century shock to European culture. By the time we got to the Second World War, everybody was more or less used to Europe being badly treated and people being killed in multitudes. The Great War introduced those themes to Western culture, and therefore it was an immense intellectual and cultural and social shock.[1]
In The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell describes the lives and works of many figures, with extended passages treating four English writers who saw combat on the Western front: Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon. The experiences of trench warfare not only affected what these and other authors wrote during the conflict, but (if they survived the war) shaped their output for the remainders of their lives. He cites mid-20th century authors like Norman Mailer and Thomas Pynchon abundantly, demonstrating that World War I has continued to shape the literary imagination.