The Great War in British Literature

Cambridge Contexts in Literature

AUTHOR(S):

Adrian Barlow

REGION:

Australia & New Zealand

LEVELS:

Year 11 / Year 12

SUBJECT AREA:

English

EDITION:

1ed

ISBN:

9780521644204

PUBLICATION DATE:

19/06/2000

Price: AUD $16.95

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Title information

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Contents

The complete series

About the authors

The Great War of 1914-18 continues to fascinate readers and writers. This book aims to explore the different ways in which the Great War has featured both as a genre and as a theme in British literature of the past century; it asks what actually is the literature of the Great War and looks at the ways in which people have read this literature, reacted to it and used it.

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Some key dates and battles of the Great War

Introduction

1. Reading the Great War
   Writing about war before 1914
   The novel 1910-14
   Pre-war issues - continuity and identity
   Pre-war issues - the role of women
   Poetry 1910-14
   The Georgians
   The Imagists
   Georgians and modernists
   'England' and 'Englishness'.
   Poetry and the war 1914-16
   1916-18 - the Somme and after
   Writing in the aftermath of the Great War
   The Great War on stage.
   Reviving the memory of the Great War
   Nostalgia and the Great War.
   The Great War in British fiction 1960-95

2. Approaching the texts
   The range of material
   Imaginative versus documentary writing
   Letters
   Diaries and notebooks
   Songs
   Poetry
   Fiction
   The 'myth' of the Great War and the Great War in modern mythology
   A canon of Great War literature?

3. Texts and extracts
   Richard Aldington from 'Farewell to Memories' & 'In Memory of Wilfred Owen'
   Marian Allen - 'The Wind on the Downs' & 'Charing Cross'
   Pat Barker from The Ghost Road
   Edmund Blunden 'To W.O. and His Kind' & 'To Wilfred Owen'
   Vera Brittain from Testament of Youth
   John Drinkwater from x=o - An Incident of the Trojan War
   Ivor Gurney - 'The Silent One'
   David Jones from In Parenthesis
   D.H. Lawrence - 'With the Guns'
   W. Somerset Maugham from For Services Rendered
   Charlotte Mew 'The Cenotaph'
   Irene Rathbone from We That Were Young
   Herbert Read 'To a Conscript of 1940'
   Isaac Rosenberg 'Returning, We Hear the Larks' & letters from The Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg
   Siegfried Sassoon - 'On Passing the New Menin Gate', 'To One Who Was With Me in the War' & from Siegfried's Journey
   Jon Stallworthy from Wilfred Owen
   Rebecca West from The Return of the Soldier

4. Critical approaches
   Anthologising the Great War
   The war poets as critics
   Critical attitudes 1920-60
   Critical attitudes after the 1960s
   Gender and feminist approaches
   Nationhood, myth and history - the Great War in British literature today

5. How to write about the Great War in British Literature
   The writer and the reader
   Authenticity - comparing texts
   The context of writing - the remembered past and the imagined past
   Your own and other readers' interpretations

6. Resources
   Chronology
   Further reading
   Glossary
   Index

Acknowledgements

Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres.

Offering critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres, Cambridge Contexts in Literature supports comparative and contextual study and is ideal for library reference or for building a senior module around a selected title. Each volume has been carefully planned to help students evaluate the influence of literary, cultural and historical contexts on both writers and readers, and includes an anthology of texts and extracts exemplifying key issues.

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