Abstract

Abstract:

This essay shows how Barker's Regeneration trilogy revises dominant histories of the First World War to emphasize working-class exploitation and the state-sanctioned social repression of dissidents and homosexuals, and does so to bring that forgotten past into explosive contact with the novels' present. Specifically, Barker's Great War trilogy turns to the past as both a historical precedent and metaphorical field to engage critically with the regressive nostalgia and repressive politics aimed at suppressing democratic dissent—the "enemies within" Britain—that characterized Thatcher's New Right in the 1980s. Addressing the politics of the present in Barker's historical fiction of the Great War, this essay dismisses earlier critics' complaints that the trilogy fails to represent the past as it was actually experienced; and it challenges interpretations that emphasize traumatic forgetting at the expense of a critical revision of historical violence. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's theory of historical materialism, which advocates for a critical reconstruction of the past to address the dangers of the present, as well as presentist models of interpreting historical fiction, the essay argues that Barker's trilogy mobilizes a counter-memory of the Great War in Britain toward a radical critique of the repressive policies of its own historical moment.

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