Memories of the Great War: Graves, Sassoon, and Findley
1986; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3138/utq.55.4.395
ISSN1712-5278
Autores Tópico(s)Military History and Strategy
ResumoIn recent years, several new books about World War I have appeared, ranging from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 (1971) to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Peter Vansittart's Voices from the Great War (1981). These writers are continuing the critical examination of the First World War that was begun by poets and novelists even while it was in progress. Henri Barbusse was the first novelist to attempt to shock the public into an anti-martial frame of mind with Le Feu (1916). While many of their contemporaries were engaged in war propaganda commissioned by the government,' some British soldier poets, including Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen, startled their readers with realistic verses written in the trenches and while on leave or in hospital in England. In the decades immediately following the war, writers continued to question its glory. In 1928, Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen Nichts Neues offered a pattern for the study of innocence wasted and destroyed by war. In the same year, Siegfried Sassoon began his attempt to understand and record what had happened to him. His memories are found both in the semi-fictional trilogy comprised of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston's Progress (1936), finally published together in 1937 as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, and in the more directly autobiographical Siegfried's Journey: 1916–1920 (1945). Graves's recollections of his war experiences form a significant part of Good-bye to All That (1929). The features common to all these works include stark realism in depicting the horrors of conflict, an emphasis on the psychological effects on individuals, and an ironic probing of the motivation behind the war as well as of the manner in which it was conducted. These qualities have become characteristic of a tradition of war literature in this century.
Referência(s)