Sharing Grief: Local and Peripheral Dimensions of the Great War in Contemporary French, British and Canadian Literature

Abstract

Critics often wonder how much our perception of the war which was to be the last of wars has been determined by literary representations following memoirs and historical accounts. Our article is devoted to the study of contemporary representations of the Great War in France (Le Monument by Claude Duneton), in Great Britain (Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore) and in English Canada (Deafening by Frances Itani), in which the vision of the apocalypse is filtered through the home fronts. The fictionalisation of the social tensions caused by the war far from its central stage helps the reader discover the total dimension of the conflict, affecting both the individual and the community, destroying the established order, on the social and cultural levels, as well as on the mental and ethical ones. If, at the turn of the twenty-first century, military history is still a source of inspiration for contemporary fiction writers, the home front is often fictionalised as well. This is a proof of an ethical shift that resituates the impact of the war far from the battlefield. The contemporary writers under consideration explore the family trauma experienced by those who remain without news of their sons, fathers, husbands or beloved, and who conceptualise the war through official reports or censored letters sent from the front.