The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War by Vincent Sherry (review)

Abstract

28o Reviews an infinitely smaller scale than the evil enacted in the public world of the twen tieth century: the Nazi death camps, the Gulag, Dresden, Hiroshima, Rwanda. Knight's book opens up important questions, but he does not do enough with them. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK BERNARD BERGONZI The Cambridge Companion to theLiterature of theFirst World War. Ed. by VINCENT SHERRY. Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress. 2005. xviii+322pp. ?I6.99. ISBN 0-521-52897-6. This outstanding volume is awelcome corrective to tired truisms surrounding Great War history, culture, and literature. Vincent Sherry's introduction argues for a literary history more attuned to the Zeitgeist of the war's early days, with their mixture of enthusiasm, excitement, and foreboding, and individual essays follow thematic strands and generate productive close readings of familiar and overlooked works. Paul Edwards examines a wide range of memoirs, both familiar and obscure, and argues that texts such as Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War display modernist features 'adopted through force of circumstance rather than aesthetic predilection' (P. 20). Edna Longley's impressive chapter on poetic form unsettles the usual 'view that the Battle of the Somme caused a poetic paradigm shift' (p. 57). Claire Buck's essay on women writers also questions the 'belief in a standard trajectory from naive enthusiasm to ironic disillusion' (p. 88) inmost Great War scholarship, especially its power to obscure valuable contributions by women, such as their work as playwrights. She celebrates ongoing retrieval efforts by feminist scholars and highlights the 'need to name the ways women were forced to negotiate the relationship between gender, nationalism, and war in their choices of genres and means of circulation' of texts (p. 88). Sherry suggests that the contradictory ways the Liberal government and media used language to rationalize the war had a profound influence on Pound, Eliot, and Woolf, who sensed a 'crisis' in political discourse and developed a new language at a time when the discourse of 'proper, rational morality was collapsing' (p. I30). British literature dominates the collection, but themiddle section gestures towards the 'World' aspect of this war with 'Pan-European views [and] transatlantic prospects' (p. I39). Marjorie Perloff's chapter on the continental avant-garde foregrounds aes thetic and ideological affinities among European intellectuals. She reminds us that in I914 'war signified [. . .] both revolution and liberation' (p. I42), and she cautions today's scholars against projecting retrospective views onto wartime artists forwhom the 'word "war" carried very different meanings' (p. i6i). Laura Marcus's chapter on war and film might seem out of place in a literary study but its attention to war films as rhetorical tools of propaganda, as well as texts worthy of critical scrutiny, amply justifies its inclusion. As Marcus argues, 'modern war and film have a com plex and profound interconnection, as twin technologies of modernity' (p. 280), and she traces such a connection in Chaplin's Shoulder Arms and Renoir's La Grande Illusion, among others. Perhaps the most intriguing essay in this collection inves tigates the ubiquitous presence of the Great War in contemporary novels. Sharon Ouditt asks 'why that war is so frequently reimagined by modern writers', and why it is the story of the 'infantry officer on theWestern Front that is told and retold' in these works (p. 245). Revisiting the war in fiction allows writers like Pat Barker to 'contextualize historical issues in present-day discourse' (p. 249) and to address explicitly issues such as homosexuality. Ouditt believes that our culture's need to preserve war myths explains their endurance in recent fiction, but also warns that the YES, 36.2, 2oo6 28i picture drawn by these postmodern narratives remains 'incomplete [and] fragmented' (p. 259). This volume's subtitle could be, with apologies toRobert Graves and Paul Fussell: 'Goodbye to all those ironic trenches, lost generations, and disillusioned soldier poets.' Sherry and his collaborators graciously acknowledge the primacy of these tropes in our cultural memory but also demonstrate new ways of reading and teach ing literary representations of the Great War. UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND GENEVIEVE BRASSARD Colonial Strangers: Women Writing theEnd of theBritish Empire. By PHYLLISLASS NER. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2004. Viii + 24I pp. $62 (pbk $24.95...