Teaching & Learning Guide for: Contemporary Approaches to the Literature of the First World War: A Critical Survey
Authors: Scutts Joanna 
Published: February 2009

Author's Introduction

This article provides an overview of recent critical approaches to the literature and culture of the First World War, which have been dominated by questions of canon formation, rooted in ongoing attempts to expand the notion of war literature beyond the poetry of upper‐class junior officers on the Western Front. These expansions have incorporated literature by women, by rank‐and‐file soldiers, and by combatants from across the British Empire and former colonies, as well as bringing much ephemeral material – including journalism, reportage, propaganda, and political material – into the purview of literary and cultural critics. Approaches to reading this ‘new’ material, as well as the established works, have also changed in recent years, beginning with 1980s feminist criticism, to emphasize war literature's constructions of gender, class, sexuality, and national identity. A different but equally important developing strand in the criticism of war writing challenges its generic separation from the major literary movements of the early twentieth century, particularly experimental modernism. These approaches have long emphasized the importance of the war as a historical context for modernism; more recently, literary critics have demonstrated specific aesthetic and verbal overlaps between modernist works and the literature of the First World War.

Author Recommends:

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1975]).

Fussell's book remains the seminal work for studying the canonical literature by Sassoon, Graves, Owen, Rosenberg, Blunden et al. Although his subtitle privileges ‘memory’, Fussell's guiding concept is more accurately ‘irony’, particularly the ironic reversal of optimism (what he refers to as ‘the abridgement of hope’), which he sees as a characteristic mode for Great War literature. His study makes broad claims for the effect of the war on the culture of the twentieth century, but his field of study is notably narrow, focusing almost entirely on upper‐class, young, male, volunteer officers.

Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: The Bodley Head, 1990).

The later but similarly influential work by Samuel Hynes examines a wider variety of cultural responses to the war and shows that ironic or protesting attitudes coexisted and competed with more conservative or pro‐war views. His study is perhaps most useful for its neat articulation of the ‘Myth’ of the war: the dominant Anglo‐American narrative according to which the war was a futile undertaking conducted by stubborn, incompetent generals who freely squandered the lives of the young soldiers.

James Campbell, ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’, New Literary History 30.1 (1999): 203–15.

Campbell's article was one of the first efforts to address the hierarchy of the canon of war writing, and its separation from the literary mainstream. He argues that critics of war literature have automatically sympathized with the soldier‐poets’ position that only combatants can understand war and have the right to comment on it: a position that has been instrumental in excluding other voices. He makes a compelling case for the need for critics to scrutinize the political assumptions and consequences of their literary judgments.

Catherine Reilly, Scars Upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War (London: Virago Press, 1981).

Critical reconsideration of the meaning of ‘war literature’ and the First World War canon is tightly bound up with the production of anthologies: what poetry is available to readers, and how it is organized, has an important influence on critical trends. This influence is perhaps clearest in the explosion of feminist critical studies of war poetry and prose that followed in the wake of Catherine Reilly's bibliography of women's war poetry and her anthology Scars Upon My Heart.

Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914–1964 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).

At first, critical studies of women's literature and war experience were shadowed by Fussell, and worked to expand his narrow focus rather than engage theoretically with his argument. Although the title of Claire M. Tylee's The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914–1964 consciously echoes the broad scope of Fussell's famous formula, and implicitly critiques his conflation of ‘modern’ with ‘masculine’ memory, her study aims primarily to bring unfamiliar and forgotten work by women into critical view.

Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Following Tylee and over two decades of subsequent studies of women's war writing, Janet S. K. Watson's Fighting Different Wars continues the trend in First World War literary criticism toward emphasizing the diversity of the war experience. Watson's study questions the over‐emphasis on gender divisions in the criticism, by exploring the variety of responses to the war among different groups organized by different war experiences.

Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The historian Jay Winter has long been concerned with the need for a sustained comparative approach to the war, and his work has repeatedly challenged the narrowly national focus of most First World War history, as well as directing critical attention towards various popular, folk responses to the war across Europe. His influential Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning examines the role of different kinds of memorials and literary works as efforts to help individuals and nations heal – a compassionate approach that challenges the Myth's focus on bitterness, anger, and irony.

Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).

The dominance of a cultural‐history approach that reads war literature primarily as documentary evidence has made literary critics reluctant to include it in their studies of contemporaneous modernist texts. Increasingly, however, critics have read modernism in the light of the war, following Trudi Tate's Modernism, History and the First World War, one of the first recent studies to note that modernism's ‘place in the history if its own time has received surprisingly little attention’ (2), and to examine how the particular historical circumstances of the war affected those who were living and writing through it.

Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Closer attention is also now being paid to the overlap in aesthetic technique between modernism and war literature, particularly in the fragmentation of narrative; Allyson Booth's Postcards from the Trenches moves beyond broad historical or ideological relationships between the war and modernism as a movement, to make specific linguistic and formal connections between texts. She argues that the way the war experience was mediated and distorted through official language, in particular, became constitutive of modernism.

Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Vincent Sherry's Great War and the Language of Modernism continues Booth's insight with a sustained account of the linguistic exchange between the language of war and the experimental voices of modernist literature.

Online Materials:

http://www.iwm.org.uk

Imperial War Museum

This is an essential first stop for First World War research, particularly from the British perspective. The site continues to grow as the museum digitizes its extensive holdings of photographs, manuscripts, printed material, and film clips. The site also offers information on the museum's history and special exhibitions as well as teaching and research guides.

http://www.awm.gov.au/

The Australian War Memorial

The Australian War Memorial offers similar resources from a different national perspective.

http://wwi.lib.byu.edu

The World War One Document Archive

A wiki hosted by Brigham Young University Library, contains links to numerous historical and literary documents including official treaties organized by year, diaries and memoirs, image library, and links to other sites.

http://www.firstworldwar.com and http://www.aftermathww1.com

Two amateur sites, Michael Duffy's First World War.com and Mike Roden's Aftermath offer a rich variety of historical and literary sources aimed at general readers, on, respectively, the war itself and its official commemoration.

http://www.cwgc.org

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission

This Web site allows users to search its database to locate the graves of relatives; it also provides a detailed history of the Commission with accompanying images, and video and audio clips of remembrance ceremonies at its cemeteries.

http://beck.library.emory.edu/greatwar/index.html

The Great War 1914–1918

This is a small, focused collection of out‐of‐print wartime poetry and postcards held by Emory University library.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/blackadder/episodes/four/four_goodbyee.shtml

Blackadder Goes Forth

The final episode of the 1989 British comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth is an excellent popular evocation of the Myth of the war as Hynes formulated it. Extracts from this episode are sometimes available online e.g. http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Blackadder+Goes+Forth+‐+Goodbyeee&emb=0#.

Sample Syllabus:

War Poetry Anthologies: Creating and Challenging the First World War Literary Canon

Overview:

This course pairs anthologies of First World War poetry with critical works, in order to uncover the enduring connections between what is read and how in the formation of a literary canon. Although the course focuses on the literature of the war, this is not solely, or even primarily, a course about the First World War, but one which encourages students to focus on the publication, circulation, and packaging of literary works as well as their content. We will study editors’ introductions and prefaces to question how far an anthology is promoting a particular interpretation of the genre as a whole, and consider how anthologies in general should be understood: are they simply useful vessels for the circulation of diverse material, or do their inclusions and exclusions teach us about artistic value? Following a chronological structure, each week we will read selections from anthologies alongside critical material that engages with the anthology's particular construction of the canon as a whole or in part, and see what changes over the years in selection, arrangement, and interpretation.

Readings:

The course reader will provide the preface, contents page, and representative selections from each anthology, along with a selection of critical readings. Further material, including cover artwork, will be available on the course Web site.

Week 1: Introduction

Joanna Scutts, ‘Contemporary Approaches to the Literature of the First World War: A Critical Survey’, Literature Compass 3/4 (2006): 10.1111/j.1741‐4113.2006.00349.x

Critical reading: Samuel Hynes. ‘Introduction: The Myth of the War’, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: The Bodley Head, 1990).

Week 2: Wartime anthologies: poetry as propaganda?

Anthology: E. B. Osborn (ed.), The Muse in Arms (London, 1917).

Critical extracts: Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987).

Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Anthology cover images and propaganda posters.

Week 3: Postwar anthologies: poetry and commemoration

Anthology: Thomas Moult (ed.), The Cenotaph: A Book of Remembrance in Poetry and Praise for November the Eleventh (London: J. Cape, 1923).

Critical extracts: Jay Winter. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Week 4: ‘Passive suffering is not a subject for poetry’: Modernism vs. the War Poets

Anthology: W. B. Yeats, ed. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

Collection: Edmund Blunden (ed.), The Poems of Wilfred Owen: A New Edition, Including Many Pieces Now First Published (New York, NY: The Viking Press, 1931).

Critical extracts: Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).

Week 5: ‘Where are the war poets?’: The Second World War in the shadow of the First

Anthology: Patricia Ledward and Colin Strang (eds), Poems of this War by Younger Poets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942).

Contemporary criticism: Cecil Day Lewis, ‘Where Are the War Poets?’, Penguin New Writing (1941); Times Literary Supplement editorial ‘To the Poets of 1940’ (1939).

Weeks 6–7: 50 years on: The canon

Anthologies: Brian Gardner (ed.), Up the Line to Death: The British War Poets, 1914–1918 (London: Methuen, 1965).

I. M. Parsons (ed.), Men Who March Away: Poems of the First World War (New York, NY: Viking, 1965).

Critical extracts: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1975]).

James Campbell, ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’, New Literary History 30.1 (1999): 203–15.

Martin Stephen, The Price of Pity: Poetry, History, and Myth in the Great War (London: Leo Cooper, 1996).

Week 8: The (re)discovery of women's poetry

Anthology: Catherine Reilly (ed.), Scars Upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War (London: Virago, 1981).

Critical extracts: Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914–1964 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).

Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

Week 9: Masculinity, class, friendship, and sexuality

Anthology: Martin Taylor (ed.), Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches (London: Constable, 1989).

Critical Extracts: Adrian Caesar, Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Week 10: International voices

Anthologies: Tim Cross (ed.), The Lost Voices of World War One: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets, and Playwrights (London: Bloomsbury, 1998).

Mark W. Van Wienen, Rendezvous with Death: American Poems of the Great War (Urbana‐Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

Weeks 11–12: Towards inclusiveness: contemporary anthologies and criticism

Anthologies: Martin Stephen, Never Such Innocence: A New Anthology of Great War Verse (London: Buchan & Enright, 1988).

Vivien Noakes (ed.), Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry (London: Sutton Publishing, 2006).

Critical extracts: Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout (eds.), The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Study Questions

Focusing on W. B. Yeats's 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, from which he famously excluded Wilfred Owen, write a brief paper either in support of Yeat's decision, or in protest against it. As evidence, you should aim to compare one or more of Owen's poems with at least two poems by different poets in the anthology, and comment in detail on the poems’ similarities and differences.

Choose introductions from two different anthologies to analyze and compare, paying particular attention to guidance given as to how to read the anthology; comparisons with previous collections; and rationale given for the selections. What deeper concerns about the war and its literary canon are revealed in the introduction(s)?

Look for one poem that appears in more than half of the anthologies we have studied. Where is it positioned in the anthology, and how is it annotated, introduced, etc? What explanation, if any, is given for its absence from another collection? Why do you think this particular poem has proved so popular, and what does its popularity tell us about the war literature canon?

In our study of Second World War poetry collections, we focused on contemporary comparisons with the First World War canon. Find an anthology of poetry from the Second World War or a later war and examine how it is introduced and what is included. Does the introduction or the arrangement of the poetry imply a particular narrative? Which poems and poets are given prominence, and why? Are comparisons made, either explicit or implicit, with the poetry of the First World War, and what are the consequences of this comparison?

How does canonical war poetry inform the production of a post‐1975 literary work, feature film, or television production about the war? Your chosen production need not be directly ‘about’ the war, but First World War poetry should play an important role. Novels might include Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy; Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong; movies include Gallipoli; Regeneration; The Trench; A Very Long Engagement; The History Boys; and television include Blackadder Goes Forth; The Trench (British reality show); TV war documentaries.

Final Project

Literary responses to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have appeared mainly on the Internet, in specialist journals, and in a limited number of printed collections. Your assignment is to track down and choose 10 to 15 poems or short prose passages that respond to either or both the wars, and you should write a 2‐page introduction explaining the rationale for your selection. You should also prepare a brief report on your research methods and an annotated list of sources. Both your selection and your introduction should demonstrate a thorough understanding of the aesthetic and political issues at stake in preparing a war poetry anthology.