The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
Fussell sheds light on a conflict that altered an entire generation’s perspective of the world. He examines the British experience from 1914 to 1918 on the Western Front, concentrating on the numerous literary techniques used to memorialize, conventionalize, and mythologize it. It also touches on the literary aspects of the actual experience. For writers who have recalled the Great War as a historical experience with enormous imaginative and aesthetic significance, Fussell provides settings, both real and poetic. The poets David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen are among these authors, as are the renowned memoirists Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden.
The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
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Fussell talks about the criticism of his writing, the writers and works that influenced him, as well as the factors that shape how we perceive and remember the war. Fussell also discusses the moving experience of conducting his research at the Department of Documents of the Imperial War Museum. The revised Suggested Further Reading List in Fussell is included. The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell is arguably the best and most academic study of how the Great War was remembered by its participants. Fussell’s book is a perceptive, sympathetic, compelling, and expertly written work that draws on the memoirs of soldiers as well as a forensic analysis of the circumstances that created them. Few books on the Great War can match its ability to engage both the mind and the heart.
Fussell captures and depicts the actual day-to-day experience of the men in the trenches more vividly than anybody else, despite the fact that the book is largely about the war in literature and memory. He participated in combat in Europe during World War II, thus he was familiar with details that non-combatants are unaware of (and, as he points out, very often did not and do not want to know). He spent three months in a chamber at the Imperial War Museum reading the Museum’s archive of papers from the British troops in World War I, which, while a large portion of his research was literary, was the rest of it.
He portrays a miserable, constricted, and increasingly meaningless daily experience. Both allied and opposing soldiers started to think that the conflict would never finish. Nobody who has studied extensively about the War will think that life in the trenches was enjoyable. But Fussell expresses precisely how dreadful and interminable it was more forcefully than anybody else I have read. His description was meant to portray war as dreadful, and it does.
