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Summary
Summary
Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world.
This brilliant work illuminates the trauma and tragedy of modern warfare in fresh, revelatory ways. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who--with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning--most effectively memorialized World War I as an historical experience. Dispensing with literary theory and elevated rhetoric, Fussell grounds literary texts in the mud and trenches of World War I and shows how these poems, diaries, novels, and letters reflected the massive changes--in every area, including language itself--brought about by the cataclysm of the Great War. For generations of readers, this work has represented and embodied a model of accessible scholarship, huge ambition, hard-minded research, and haunting detail.
Restored and updated, this new edition includes an introduction by historian Jay Winter that takes into account the legacy and literary career of Paul Fussell, who died in May 2012.
Author Notes
Paul Fussell Jr. was born in Pasadena, California on March 22, 1924. He was drafted into the Army in 1943 while attending Pomona College. During his tour of duty, he won the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. He returned to college in 1945. He received a bachelor of arts degree from Pomona College in 1947 and a master's degree and a doctorate in English from Harvard University. He taught English at Connecticut College for Women, Rutgers University, and the University of Pennsylvania. During this time he wrote several books on literary topics including The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, and Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing.
In 1975, he published The Great War and Modern Memory, which was a study of World War I and how its horrors fostered a disillusioned modernist sensibility. This book won both the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the National Book Award for Arts and Letters. His other works include Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America, and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic. He died of natural causes on May 23, 2012 at the age of 88.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | p. viii |
| Introduction | p. ix |
| Preface to the Original Edition | p. xv |
| Credits | p. xviii |
| Chapter 1 A Satire of Circumstance | p. 3 |
| Chapter 2 The Troglodyte World | p. 39 |
| Chapter 3 Adversary Proceedings | p. 82 |
| Chapter 4 Myth, Ritual, and Romance | p. 123 |
| Chapter 5 Oh What a Literary War | p. 168 |
| Chapter 6 Theater of War | p. 207 |
| Chapter 7 Arcadian Recourses | p. 251 |
| Chapter 8 Soldier Boys | p. 293 |
| Chapter 9 Persistence and Memory | p. 336 |
| Afterword | p. 363 |
| Notes | p. 371 |
| Index | p. 390 |