The Great War and Modern Memory

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.

Table of Contents:
A Satire Of Circumstance ; The Troglodyte World ; Adversary Proceedings ; Myth, Ritual, and Romance ; Oh What a Literary War ; Theater of War ; Arcadian Recourses ; Soldier Boys ; Persistence and Memory

About the Author :
Paul Fussell is Donald T. Regan Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Review :
"One of the best nonfiction works I've ever read. I'm a huge fan of virtually everything Fussell has ever done, but this unique book, which uses literature and social history to examine World War I, may be his best. Unflinching."--James Gray, he Week "Literary and historical materials, in themselves not unfamiliar, are brought together in a probing, sympathetic, and finally illuminating fashion. It is difficult to think of a scholarly work in recent years that has more deeply engaged the reader at both the intellectual and emotional level."--The New Republic (on the previous edition) "Paul Fussell's Great War and Modern Memory introduced an entirely new and creative way of writing both about war and the literature it generates. It has been a profound influence on historians and literary critics alike. It is a model of intelligence and fine writing and will remain a key text in our culture for decades to come."--John Keegan Praise for the previous edition "Skillful, compassionate....An important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds."--Frank Kermode, The New York Times Book Review "One doesn't know quite where to begin to praise this book in which literary and historical materials, in themselves not unfamiliar, are brought together in a probing, sympathetic, and finally illuminating fashion. It is difficult to think of a scholarly work in recent years that has more deeply engaged the reader at both the intellectual and emotional level."--The New Republic "A learned and well-balanced book that is also bright and sensitive....A last irony leaps from these pages: the men of the First World War were heroes as great as the cast of the Iliad, yet their words destroyed the concept of themselves, of all warriors, and of war itself as heroic."--The New Yorker