Abstract
As Randall Stevenson reminds his readers, presumably people who need no reminding of the fact, ‘A century later, the Great War is still remembered as a central influence on the emergence of the modern world’ (p. 186). Undoubtedly, one of the most significant influences in the way Britons remember the war is through the pens of war poets canonized as heralds of the war’s futility and waste. Though poets’ interpretation of the war’s pathos is subject to dispute, even rancour, among historians, the fact remains that the war’s literary legacy is important to understanding the Great War’s cultural impact, its cultural resonance, in British society.
The Great War’s legacy is intrinsically linked to its writers. Stevenson, quoting Edmund Blunden, reminds us that the ‘soul’ of the war generation is found in its books. He writes, ‘Twenty-first century readers cannot enter those chilly trenches, or look by any means directly into those aching, dead spaces’ (p. 233). For many now living, the voice of a Great War veteran is unknown, their stories forgotten. But through the ample writings of veterans, Stevenson contends, we can ‘still find some way up the communication trenches war writing provides’, and get a sense of who these soldiers were and how they reflected on the war (p. 233).
Stevenson’s Literature and the Great War is a significant contribution to a relatively crowded field of First World War literary and memory studies. The author’s intention is to write an assessment of First World War literature, here almost entirely British, in light of recent criticism and research since Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory and Samuel Hynes’s A War Imagined. What results is a thoughtful literary introduction to Great War literature organized according to four thematic chapters: ‘Unspeakable War’, ‘Unaccountable War’, ‘Unfamiliar Lines’, and ‘Unforgettable War’. Each chapter is part literary criticism and part cultural history of war literature. Stevenson’s novel organization is sometimes frustrating in its abstraction, but it is also original in the way he engages with the notion of the war as an ongoing communicative experience between readers and writers. The organization reflects his core argument – that the war changed language and that language, in turn, changed the way we see war – an argument at its heart about the transference of war memories into culture through literature.
The author has a firm grasp of the field and has a cross-disciplinary mastery of the secondary literature. Some parts of the book will raise the ire of historians: ‘Like the troubled mind of a trauma patient, the conscience of later ages continues to return repeatedly to the Great War, simply because its events were too deranged and desolate – too far beyond the destructiveness even of earlier conflicts – even to have been fully contained in mind or conscience’ (p. 224). Issues of public memory and discussions of ‘conscience’ should be approached carefully; at times Stevenson reaches for conclusions on the war’s impact that will go too far for some historians who have little patience for cultural generalizations on the literary memory of the war. The book also relies on many of the ‘usual suspects’ of war poets (Owen, Sassoon, Blunden, Graves) as well as novelists/memoirists (Ford, Brittain, Aldington, Remarque, Williamson, Manning), but with the significant caveat that there has been much effort to include non-canonical writers where appropriate. The chapter ‘Unaccountable War’ would have been greatly strengthened with a consideration of the varieties of war literature released in the 1920s, as its principal focus remains on disillusioned authors of the Western Front. This may attract criticism for those looking for reasons to dismiss the book as representative of Fussellian literary myth-making.
But to do so would be a mistake. Overall, Stevenson is balanced on the literary memory of the war. His final chapter – ‘Unforgettable War’ – is a useful corrective to histor-ians who push too hard against war literature’s importance in the formation of the memory of the war. Stevenson wrestles with the issue of cultural disillusionment and war literature in light of recent revisionism in British history. This chapter is careful and well argued. It reminds readers that whether military historians like it or not, disillusionment is a part of the memory of the war generation, but Stevenson offers nuance on this term and its broader meaning. Dislocation and disruption, heroism and horror, detachment and disillusionment are all a part of the war’s residual cultural impact. Thus Literature and the Great War will give students going into the centennial an assortment of new themes and approaches on some very well-trodden ground.