Boklakh, D., Hrosevych, T., Tabakova, H., Ieliseienko, A., Chystiak, D. The problem of war and peace in European literature of the 20th century (original) (raw)
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Writing War, Wronging the Person: Representation of Human Insecurity in War Literature
Journal of English Language and Literature
This paper presents a survey of literature written in response to wars throughout the world. The paper argues that plays, poems, memoirs and novels have been written to celebrate combatants as heroes; war literature has also been written to overcome the trauma of war while other literature has been written to underscore the effects of war and to speak out against wars. The paper also discusses the rationale for studying war literature and argues that as creative expression, literature allows us, through the imagined world of the author, to identify social trends and structures that shape the world, in particular, the factors that lead to and sustain conflict, as well as experiences of war and its long term individual and general effects. Also, literature's aesthetic quality and its capacity to engage its audience makes it easier to transmit war time experience, and hopefully the wisdom gained from that experience, from one generation to another.
2016
Literature is shaped by many influences and war is one of them. Over the time war inspired many great literary works. However, no other event inspired this much literary works as World War I had. Literature began to change and evolve during and after World War I. Many authors of the time became disillusioned by the war and its aftermath, this destroyed their view and belief in traditional values. The amount of death and destruction they saw made them skeptic about everything. As a form of expressing this disillusionment and decay the writers broke new literary ground. The grief and despair caused by the war guided the writers towards modernist sentiment. This dissertation is an attempt to show the devastating impact of World War I, its literary representation and writers' response to this profound human experience. This paper has attempted to examine some of these writers' famous war literature to focus on the views they have expressed regarding war; their experiences during the war time and how those experiences forced them to speak up about these issues despite of strict political situation at that time. This paper has analyzed the work of four writers who wrote during the time of World War I. This research has focused on traditional war literature like the novels of Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway and poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to show how these writers wrote not only to record what they had seen and experienced but also to create a resistance against the glorification of war. The first chapter of this dissertation will look into how Remarque's experience of this cataclysmic event urged him to write such novel that is well known as an anti-war novel and how aptly this novel has depicted the realities of the war. In order to gain different perspectives of writers on war and the impact of war the second chapter will look into Ernest Hemingway's war literature. Followed by this, the third chapter will shed light on Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to understand what prompt them to produce such profound anti-war novels and poetry despite of strict political situation during that time. After having read these authors of different background, style and Nawar 2 nationality this study has found that World War I generated a platform, a unison where all the barriers transcended, the concept of nationalism, patriotism and bravery were redefined, challenged and thrown away. Nawar 3
The Great War altered the traditional notion of war literature where war was assumed to be a cause for glory and pride. New technologies were unleashed, and for the first time a major war was fought not only on land and sea but below the sea and in the skies as well. Not only was the geographical landscape altered by the war but it also changed the lives of the soldiers. This thesis will look at two novels to detail how the representation of war in literature was transformed by World War I. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is one of the most influential novels in World War I literature. Mulk Raj Anand's novel, Across the Black Waters is a rare World War I novel written from an Indian perspective. Both are postwar novels. Remarque's novel was first published in 1929, while Anand's novel came out in 1939. The titles of the novels reveal an ironic undertone ,emphasizing a connotative meaning, which outlays the undertones of the Great War. Both novels locate the horror of war but from different angles. Lives of the soldiers were dependent on the mode of survival by disconnecting their emotional capability. Both novels are realistic and draw a real picture of the catastrophe that the war creates in terms of violence, misery, plight, terror and repression. The purpose of this study is to show how the two novels differ in their representation of war literature and also, how this very representation is different from the novels that were written in pre-World War I era. So, the thesis will constitute an in-depth look into the battlefield. Historical material will be studied and analyzed along with the critical readings.
Book Review Bringing War to Book
Res Militaris, 2019
Military sociologists Woodward & Jenkings wrote a book about their research on 40 years of British military memoirs (1980-present), from a sociological perspective. I wrote this review both as a fellow military memoir researcher and as a soldier-author myself. "Bringing war to book" is a must-read introduction for every student and researcher who starts studying military memoirs or the military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET), as it deals with all the main aspects of military books, from censorship to writing motives and from truth claims to covers. However, the informal writing style makes it a book that will also appeal to the layman (both readers and writers) interested in knowing more about (UK) military non-fiction.
A Challenge to Global Literary History: The Case of World War I
Arcadia, 2018
This essay begins by investigating the possibility of a global literary history through the lens of periodization and its challenges for comparatists, starting from World War I. Second, by examining neglected texts from the periphery, it seeks to 'provincialize' the Eurocentric focus of our histories of war literature. To address the complex temporality of this epoch, we must accommodate the multicultural contexts from which these works emerge, as well as the long-term recovery of texts. Belatedness reflects the reemergence of memories from trauma, the discovery of manuscripts, the paucity of translations, and the long silencing of marginalized voices from the periphery. In turn, shifts in critical values and the translation of materials permit us to enlarge and reconstitute a globalized archive, as a few examples demonstrate. Great War texts by Huidobro, Svarnakumari, and Diallo as well as oral laments offer fruitful perspectives from the periphery on that epochal experience.