Oscillations on the Hotspur-Falstaff Spectrum: Paul Fussell and the Ironies of War

Abstract

This article reviews the main arguments of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory and seeks to retrieve the author’s objectives from the wider problems that have subsequently become the subject of scholarly debate, such as the relation of the war to modernism, and to evaluate the strengths and limitations of his survey. It focuses on the issues of `high diction’ in poetry and rhetoric, the persistence of myth, the dynamics of consolation and the uses of irony, and considers particularly the powerful critique of J.M. Winter in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995). It concludes with some reflections on the obvious autobiographical elements in Fussell’s work.