Modern British Literature
by Patrick Deer
Category: Literary Criticism

Culture in Camouflage does for Second World War writing what Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory did for the First World War. It describes how the British state and war machine struggled to produce a fully modernized and persuasive war culture in two world wars by freely cannibalizing art and literature in times of crisis: when they lacked the technology, funds or manpower they used war culture to project their strategic fantasies ofa war of space and movement waged by imperial air power or mechanized warfare. The book explores what it was like for writers to try and find their own points of view on the action in the face of both the shatteringviolence and alienation of total war and an overpowering official war culture.