The Literature of the Great War

BOOK REVIEWS Dalgarno, did Woolf recognize the connection of the mirror with her early experience of abuse and come to see the mirror as offering "a rare glance at the constitution of the female subject." In contrast to scholars such as Louise DeSalvo who read this scene unproblematically in terms of how it affects Woolf s adult sense of self, Dalgarno interprets the scene in terms of its "performative power, in the sense that it contributes to the imaging of her subjectivity." Gerald's actions, framed by the mirror, split Woolf s subject position between the victim who cannot see or speak this violation and the witness who later writes it out and thereby makes it real. "In the autobiography," Dalgarno writes, "Gerald represents a position that is necessary to figure the passage of the female subject out of the imaginary." Dalgarno's book weds poststructuralist theory to cultural history to reveal that new notions of identity (associated with the visible) and subjectivity (coming into being at the juncture of the visible and the writeable ) do not come from philosophy or psychoanalytic theory or literature alone, but from changes in institutions, such as the university and the press; from technologies, such as the telescope and the camera; and from changes in the ways in which people see, write, and remember. At the same time, however, she shows how much is lost in readings of Woolf that fail to show the extent to which "social problems manifest themselves in [Woolf s] work primarily as problems of language and subjectivity ." In the end, this reader is unable to pulled together Dalgarno's eclectic interests into a coherent summary of her argument, and there are isolated passages throughout in which I had difficulty following the logic of analysis. However, this difficulty speaks less to my failure as a reader or to Dalgarno's as a writer than to the complexity of Dalgarno's vision in this study. Pamela L. Caughie ______________ Loyola University Chicago The Literature of the Great War Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout, eds. The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory. New York: Palgrave, 2001 xiv + 245 pp. $65.00 THIS COLLECTION of fifteen essays is presented as part of an ongoing revision of approaches to First World War literature. Over the past twenty years, the editors suggest, interest has extended beyond the small group of exclusively male war poets and prose writers given legitimacy as canonical witnesses by their presence at the Front. Feminist 191 ELT 46 : 2 2003 scholars have explored the role of women within the war machine and across diverse "home fronts"; Cultural Studies has expanded notions of "writing" to examine the interaction of literary conventions with propaganda and popular culture or psychology and medical discourse. Comparative literary study has also helped widen study by including writers beyond the usual handful of English poets—a purblindness that always risked echoing the class and race prejudices that were responsible for so many deaths at the time. Quinn and Trout therefore divide the essays into five sections to reflect these new avenues of study. "Textuality and War" has two essays that examine memoir and newspaper discourse. "Beyond the Trenches" contains four essays on women's writing. "Nationality and Response" includes work on women's writing in France, America, and a comparative analysis of responses from Australia, New Zealand and Canada. "Modernists at War" and "Revising the War Poets," the two last sections, are offered as revisionist interventions into the established field of the literary responses to war. The subtitle, "Beyond Modern Memory," is richly evocative. It might suggest the urgency of addressing the Great War as the last direct witnesses dwindle in number, and memory becomes history. It might invoke the contemporary "memory wars" that have exploded so violently in the last fifteen years—from disputes over the reliability of personal memory to the intense public dissension over appropriate memorialisation, particularly of war. There has been a large body of work dedicated to this topic, from James E. Young's comparative study of holocaust memorials (The Texture of Memory) to the work in the Cambridge University Press series, Studies in the Social and Cultural History...