Introduction

Abstract

The past two decades have brought profound changes both to our understanding of the Great War as a cultural event and to our conception of what we mean by, and include in, the term ‘war literature’. Twenty years ago, the critical gaze of British and North American literary scholars seldom wandered beyond the works of the English ‘war poets’ or the prose literature of so-called ‘disillusionment’, texts such as All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Anns, Good-bye to All That and — as the single female contribution to a supposedly masculine genre — Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. Today, a far more complex, varied and contradictory assemblage of works confronts us, as the designation ‘war literature’ has moved beyond the battlefield to include the creative expressions (whatever their rhetorical context or ideological orientation) of anyone, soldier or civilian, man or woman, who struggled to interpret the unthinkable. Divided more or less evenly between poetry and prose, between essays that examine such canonical figures as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and those that recover literary voices long ignored, and comprised, again virtually in equal measure, of contributions from male and female scholars, this collection presents the myriad faces of Great War literary study at the close of the twentieth century.