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Product Description
Review
Praise for the previous edition
"Skillful, compassionate....An important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds."--Frank Kermode, The New York Times Book Review
"One doesn't know quite where to begin to praise this book in which literary and historical materials, in themselves not unfamiliar, are brought together in a probing, sympathetic, and finally illuminating fashion. It is difficult to think of a scholarly work in recent years that has more deeply engaged the reader at both the intellectual and emotional level."--The New Republic
"A learned and well-balanced book that is also bright and sensitive....A last irony leaps from these pages: the men of the First World War were heroes as great as the cast of the Iliad, yet their words destroyed the concept of themselves, of all warriors, and of war itself as heroic."--The New Yorker
Book Description
By mid-December, 1914, British troops had been fighting on the Continent for over five months. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
the Why, not so much the What,
By
This review is from: The Great War and Modern Memory (Paperback)
Keegan does a better job of explaining the "what" of war and his volume on WW I is superb. But ever since I first heard of Pickett's charge, I always wondered what why the soldiers would so willingly march to their deaths. This volume explores that issue through the literature of the period. It is a densely constructed book filled with literary criticism and quotations of long forgotten poetry and fiction. Unless you are familiar with the language of literary criticism written for an academic audience -- you WILL be consulting a dictionary quite often just to grasp the meaning of a paragraph. In fact, the text is more of a literary criticism of the writings from the period than a social or military history. That's not so bad as the literature reviewed owes its all to the war and the nuances of the literature are important. When the book was written, the author was a professor of English and was making his name as a scholar in the field - not a social historian. Nevertheless, it is a superb mid-point in a study of WW-I.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Literary War,
By Gabriel Orgrease (Bullamanka, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Great War and Modern Memory (Paperback)
A book relevant to the current situation of the War on Terrorism.Fussell's focus is the literary context of the British trench experience of WW1. Contending, as he well illustrates, that for the British WW1 was an extremely literary war. In the trenches young men were reading books, writing poetry, sending letters home, subscribing to magazines, and for those who were not slaughtered, beginning careers as writers... such as with Robert Graves. Fussell starts out with Thomas Hardy and ends off with Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, and even connects Alan Ginsberg's Howl to the Great War literary tradition. Along the way he explores a panoply of authors whereby the terribly horrid war was imagined within a context of the British literary tradition (Chaucer, Shakespeare, King Arthur etc.), and it becomes evident that the war may have been prolonged, and not sooner negotiated to a close, as a result of the elaboration of heroic story. The summer of 1972 Fussell spent in the British War Museum in a secluded room going through boxes of troop correspondence. There is an interesting emphasis on the "language" of war, the words used to describe bodies blown about into indistinguishable lumps of flesh sort of thing. War is not an imaginable event, and yet we as conscious humans need to give war a face that we can live with... and in some cases be willing to die for. I find the book relevent to now in respect of considering how the War on Terrorism is envisioned within the American literary tradition (Bush knows his Huck Finn). The metaphors, the words, the use of past examples to describe war derive from our literary and historical context.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The GW&MM has opened whole new worlds for me.,
By R.W. Butcher (Coldspring, TX United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Great War and Modern Memory (Paperback)
Given that fifteen of the sixteen previous customer reviews have contained cogent and quite articulate praise for Professor Fussell's book, my praises may seem redundant. However, this is such a brilliant and important book that I am compelled to write about it.I have been obsessed with The GW&MM since I first read it in 1978, so obsessed that I have read it many times. Each time I read it new ideas and new authors spring out of the text and send me to the library or bookstore. Fussell's prose is captivating, and his scholarship is breathtaking in both breadth and depth. My first reading of The GS&MM was in Belgium during a Sabbatical year in Brussels. Our son was writing a senior ISP on the effect of the German invasion on Belgium, and we went to Ypres as part of the research. We were both overwhelmed by the 105 Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries there, and reading The GW&MM during that period helped to put these beautiful and touching burial grounds into the context of the mud and stink that was the Salient during (and for several years after) 1914-1918. Prof. Fussell introduced me to Graves (my favorite) and Sassoon and Blunden and David Jones and Wifred Owen and opened the door to these wonderful novelists and poets for a biochemist without much appreciation of British literature. The GW&MM presents an amazing constellation of knowledge and understanding and compassion for the victims of WW I, and my recommendation of this masterpiece is totally enthusiastic and without reservation.
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