page_title: World War I in popular culture
section_title: Literature
hierarchical_section_title: World War I in popular culture / Literature
caption_attribution_description: Remarque, Erich Maria: Im Westen nichts Neues. Roman. Berlin: Propyläen 1929, 287 Seiten. Erstdruck mit Original-Verlagsumschlag (Wilpert/Gühring² 3)
context_page_description: The years of warfare were the backdrop for art which is now preserved and displayed in such institutions as the Imperial War Museum in London, the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Official war artists were commissioned by the British Ministry of Information and the authorities of other countries.
  After 1914, avant-garde artists began to consider and investigate many things that had once seemed unimaginable. As Marc Chagall later remarked, "The war was another plastic work that totally absorbed us, which reformed our forms, destroyed the lines, and gave a new look to the universe." In this same period, academic and realist artists continued to produce new work. Traditional artists and their artwork developed side by side with the shock of the new as culture reinvented itself in relationships with new technologies.
  Some artists responded positively to the changes wrought by war. C. R. W. Nevinson, associated with the Futurists, wrote that "This war will be a violent incentive to Futurism, for we believe there is no beauty except in strife, and no masterpiece without aggressiveness."
context_section_description: World War I has been the subject of numerous novels; by far the most well-known is Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, which presented a bleak view of the war from the German perspective.
  The war was also the subject of well-known poetry, most notably by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, both of whom served in the war (as did Remarque). Another notable poem is "In Flanders Fields" by Canadian soldier John McCrae, who also served in the war; it led to the use of the remembrance poppy as a symbol for soldiers who have died in war.
  Several entire genres grew out of the disillusionment and disappointment of World War I.  The hard-boiled detective novels of the 1920s featured bitter veteran protagonists.  The horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft  after the war showed a new sense of nihilism and despair in the face of an uncaring, chaotic cosmos, very unlike his more conventional horror before the war.
  World War I was never quite so fertile a topic as World War II for American fiction, but there were nevertheless a large number of fictional works created about it in Europe, Canada, and Australia. Many war novels, however, have fallen out of print since their original.  Numerous scholarly studies have covered the major fictional authors and writings.
caption: Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front
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