The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory (review)

The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory. Eds. Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. xiv + 245. $65.00.

The aim of this collection is to "illustrate the fresh perspectives brought to Great War scholarship in recent years" by exploring "promising new areas of research" (4). Our perspective on World War I literature has shifted from Paul Fussell's indispensable The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), as editors Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout stress in their introduction. They argue that a "far more complex, varied and contradictory assemblage of works confronts us, as the designation 'war literature' has moved beyond the battlefield to include the creative expressions . . . of anyone, soldier or civilian, man or woman, who struggled to interpret the unthinkable" (1). Unfortunately, when it comes to providing new readings of established works, their volume suffers from a case of anxiety of influence toward its famous precursor. Several contributors recapitulate Fussell's reduction of World War I literature to the ironic poetry of the soldier-poets, a position disputed repeatedly over the past quarter century, most persuasively by Samuel Hynes, Claire Tylee, and Trudi Tate. However, many essays here do provide compelling introductions to obscure or overlooked authors of war literature and complicate our definition of the genre itself in productive ways.

The selection is broad and generous in its attention to authors, genres, and nationalities, but also oddly redundant in individual components. The editors attempt to expand our definition of what constitutes literature by including essays on the attitudes toward war in popular newspapers and the autobiography of a member of the Royal Flying Corps, but they devote four articles to the critical reassessment of Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Such attention throws off the otherwise carefully balanced content of their selections and even comes across as a compensatory gesture, as if their collection would be incomplete without revisiting Fussell's preferred subjects. The inclusion of a detailed analysis of French women's war poetry also seems anomalous in a volume devoted exclusively to English-speaking writers. However, Nancy Sloan Goldberg's study, with its attention to feminist debates between essentialist and constructionist positions, and the other articles on women authors at the heart of this volume, provide the richest material to ponder.

This strength will not surprise readers aware of the tremendous impact of gender studies on scholarship about the war in the past fifteen years. Debra Rae Cohen's essay on the little-known war fiction of Stella Benson, for example, builds a strong case for the inclusion into the war canon of realist novels, which "illuminate the workings of conflicting ideologies on the home front" (38). Terry Phillips's survey of May Sinclair's attitude to the war in works such as her "dialogic" Tree of Heaven (1918) complicates previous assessments of this author as a simple-minded purveyor of propaganda (59). Some chapters, such as Deborah Tyler-Bennett's examination of the poetry of Edith Sitwell, H.D., and others, open up new avenues of research with their broad overview, while whetting the reader's appetite with tantalizing sketches of too many writers. Donna Coates's detailed and impassioned survey of Commonwealth writers too numerous to list here provides groundbreaking analysis of a body of work "completely neglected" by scholars of women's war literature, and leaves me hoping for a book-length study on the subject (113). One drawback to many of these fine essays is their introductory feel; their attempt to cover too much terrain in a restrained space at times fails to do justice to their worthy subjects. Another, perhaps due to the vagaries of academic publishing, lies in bibliographic gaps, such as the absence of any reference to Suzanne Raitt's recent biography of Sinclair, or the lack of reference in Goldberg's essay to Susan Grayzel's study of gender and motherhood in Britain and France during the war. ¹ [End...