Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Great War and Modern Memory
    The Great War and Modern Memory
    The Great War and Modern Memory
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Great War and Modern Memory

    Written by Paul Fussell

    Narrated by James Anderson Foster

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world.

    This brilliant work illuminates the trauma and tragedy of modern warfare in fresh, revelatory ways. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who-with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning-most effectively memorialized World War I as an historical experience. Dispensing with literary theory and elevated rhetoric, Fussell grounds literary texts in the mud and trenches of World War I and shows how these poems, diaries, novels, and letters reflected the massive changes-in every area, including language itself-brought about by the cataclysm of the Great War.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 20, 2018
    ISBN9781977376596
    The Great War and Modern Memory

    Related to The Great War and Modern Memory

    Related audiobooks

    Wars & Military For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Tragedy of Edmund Morris

      May 28, 2019

      The Tragedy of Edmund Morris
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Roots Of German Militarism

      Sep 29, 2022

      The Roots Of German Militarism
      5 min read

    • Article

      Some Wars Are Just

      Nov 24, 2022

      Some Wars Are Just
      6 min read

    • Article

      Towering Figures

      Nov 6, 2018

      Towering Figures
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Sunny Depiction Of Dark Times

      Sep 28, 2023

      A Sunny Depiction Of Dark Times
      6 min read

    • Article

      Bloomsberries At War PAUL BAILEY Writing In The Dark: Bloomsbury, The Blitz, And Horizon Magazine

      Jul 28, 2021

      Bloomsbury £20 The subtitle of Will Loxley’s first book does not sound especially adventurous or challenging. Haven’t we, both readers and writers, been here before? It’s not entirely fanciful to imagine a bookshop that sells nothing but biographies,

      3 min read

    • Article

      Artists The Auteur

      Nov 5, 2019

      Artists The Auteur
      9 min read

    • Article

      Frontline Oracle

      Jun 1, 2023

      David Chrisinger's The Soldier's Truth is a road book suffused with a spirit of discovery and adventure. Perhaps no genre is better suited to its subject, the World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, who could not stay home. Chrisinger asked himself wh

      4 min read

    • Article

      Bomber Onslaught

      Apr 30, 2019

      Bomber Onslaught
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Nation’s Alibi

      Feb 25, 2020

      A Nation’s Alibi
      8 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Oct 4, 2018

      Reviews
      8 min read

    • Article

      We Shall Never Surrender

      Nov 2, 2022

      We Shall Never Surrender
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Mosaic Of Conflict

      Jan 18, 2024

      A Mosaic Of Conflict
      2 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Nov 26, 2020

      Reviews
      6 min read

    • Article

      Rhyme Of The Times

      Jun 30, 2022

      A MAJOR POWER IN EASTERNEurope, an empire that has seen better days and with a long-standing grievance against a much smaller neighbour. It begins a military build-up which many think is a diplomatic bluff — right up to the point when invading troops

      4 min read

    • Article

      Salute The Master Of Sword And Word

      Jun 29, 2023

      HOW MANY BRITISH GENERALS HAVE been able to write as well as they could fight? Strangely perhaps, quite a few. Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver (Dilemmas of the Desert War, The Seven Ages of the British Army etc), General Sir David Fraser (And We Sha

      6 min read

    • Article

      Centuries Of Iron

      Jan 19, 2023

      Centuries Of Iron
      2 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Nov 28, 2019

      Reviews
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Horror Of War And The Thrill Of Horror

      Jun 21, 2019

      THE FIRST WORLD War wasn’t just itself a great horror. In Wasteland, W. Scott Poole makes a compelling case that it launched a great age of horror fiction. After the armistice of November 1918, a wave of vivid memoirs, plays, novels, and poems tried

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Great War and Modern Memory

    4.5/5

    298 ratings12 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I had read and heard about Fussell's classic for years, so finally I bought myself a copy and read it. This book is all it claims to be and more. Fussell examines how British slang, British drama, poetry and memoirs from the First World War have shaped the ways we remember and think about war.
    • 4/5
      A challenging read, not to be taken as a straight history of the First World War but as an informative and engaging tour of the way literature and drama both informed and were informed by the war, in pursuit of the author's thesis that the predominantly ironic mode of understanding life in the twentieth century has its roots in WW1.
    • 4/5
      From the WWI reading program. Author Paul Fussell points out the number of terms that became permanent parts of the language due to WWI - "in the trenches", "going over the top", "no-man's land". (I was thinking more of terms that no longer have a military meaning, or at least not a primarily military meaning. People who talk about going "over the top" nowadays no longer associate the idea with getting a burst of machine gun fire in the chest.) I can't think of anything similar from WWII; maybe "blitz"? Or the popularity of calling people you disapprove of Nazis? I wonder how many trenchcoat wearers realize the big pockets are for grenades, the d-rings are to strap equipment down, and the double flap over the front keeps your buttons from being caught when you crawl under barbed wire.There are a lot of eerie moments - the description of the summer of 1914 being one of the best in memory provokes me a little, because for the life of me I can't remember what the summer of 2001 was like.Fussell makes the argument - which I find possible but not fully convincing - was that the experience of WWI for the Allies prolonged the course of WWII. Supposedly, the US was so horrified of casualties that it wasted many opportunities to be aggressive, thus allowing the Nazis to do an organized retreat. He does not cite any specific example of a battle or part of the 1944-1945 campaign where a more aggressive strategy could have been used, however. Certainly, Patton's push out of the Normandy beaches and Market-Garden were aggressive to a fault; I can't think of anywhere else where a more offensive approach would have helped.Fussell seems to be pretty much a literate liberal. One particular item of note is he is the author of the famous essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb", which got him no end of FLAK from the intelligentsia. Fussell was waiting to go in a part of Operation Olympic (so was my father, adding some personal relevance) and he recalls he first reaction to the news of Hiroshima as "I'm going to live after all". To Fussell's credit, he doesn't just express this as a personal feeling, but poses some cogent arguments against the accepted liberal doctrine about "The Bomb". For example, to the argument that the war would have been over in "a few months" even if the bomb was not used, he points out that Allied soldiers were dying at the rate of a few hundred a week even at this late point, and that several thousand Japanese soldiers and civilians were dying each week. Thus "a few months wait" might have actually cost more Japanese lives, not just Allied lives, than using the bomb.I'm also grateful to Fussell for introducing me to the poetry of Randall Jarrell, who is the only English language WWII poet of the same stature as the WWI poets. I wonder why? Maybe some of the stuff that happened in WWII was beyond poetry.
    • 5/5
      While it's true that Fussell prefers later memoirs to more immediate accounts of the war and doesn't conclusively prove that the First World War was history's first or most ironic war, "The Great War and Modern Memory" remains a wonderfully engaging and useful example of intellectual history. Fussell does a very good, very thorough, and very thoughtful job of examining the mindset of those who fought in the war and describing that era's intellectual climate. Though relatively free of statistics and accounts of wartime strategizing, the book is serves as a subtle portrait of the war's multitudinous horrors, which made death more mechanical and, in a sense, less traditionally dramatic than it had ever been before. Fussell writes convincingly about the breach that the book opened up between civilian and military life, homoeroticism before and after the war, how experiences of the war changed our ideas about wartime honor and heroism, and, perhaps most interestingly, examines how soldiers used ironic and theatrical motifs to process experiences that simply couldn't be put into words. Fussell's assertion that the Great War had an extensive influence on how civilian life during the rest of the twenty-first century is probably more controversial, but he ably shows how many of the institutions of modern life (the form letter, for one) were field-tested, so to speak, during that conflict. What I personally enjoyed most about this book is the sense of importance that Fussell lends to his ideas: he makes the poems that soldiers wrote and the self-conceptions their societies had seem as critical as any piece of armament you could name. "The Great War and Modern Memory" does exactly what any academic treatise should: make ideas seem vital and alive. This one should be required reading for students of all things Modernist.
    • 4/5
      Very enjoyable, very thought-provoking, but not necessarily very convincing, Fussell's sui-generis book is an extended literary criticism masquerading as social history – or perhaps the other way round. There are various arguments going on in here, but the main thrust is that much of how we think about the modern world – indeed our whole contemporary mindset – has its origin in ideas that came about as an attempt to respond to the unprecedented scale and irony of the 1914-18 conflict.‘Irony’ is the crucial term. And a famously vague one; let me first, like a teenager giving a graduation speech, turn to the OED's third sense of the word:A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what was or might be expected; an outcome cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations.For Fussell, ‘Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends’; and ‘the Great War was more ironic than any before or since’. Highlighting the insanity of trench warfare, and the ‘ridiculous proximity of the trenches to home’, Fussell first traces the various ways people responded to this grotesque irony, and then considers how it has affected language, culture and thought processes since.Though he does look at some contemporary letters and diaries, his main sources of evidence are the great literary responses to the war, especially Sassoon, Graves, Blunden, Owen, and David Jones, and he locates the source of all their techniques in ‘irony-assisted recall’.I love this attention to irony as the defining quality of the war; but it also epitomises a sense I had that Fussell was claiming a special status for the First World War that it didn't really possess. After all, irony is hardly new. To me, it seems to be a central part of war literature almost as far back as you can go: Homeric irony is almost proverbial.Similarly it seems quite a claim to say that 1914-18 was unusually marked by a ‘sense of adversary proceedings’, an ‘us against them’ mentality, since this is surely characteristic of the whole notion of what war is. If anything, the WWI literature I've read has been notable for its awareness that the other side was exactly the same as them; I think of the German and French soldiers trapped all night together in the shell-hole in All Quiet on the Western Front, for instance.Just one more example to make my point. Fussell believes there is something unusually theatrical in the English conception of this war:During the war, it was the British, rather than the French, the Americans, the Italians, the Portuguese, the Russians, or the Germans, who referred to trench raids as ‘shows’ or ‘stunts’ […] And it is English playwrights – or at least Anglo-Irish ones – like Wilde and Shaw who compose plays proclaiming at every point that they are plays.But this is weird, not just because of the qualification he needed in that last sentence, but because when I think of deliberately artificial stagecraft I think of Brecht – a German – and the term used for this in modern theatre studies is a German one, Verfremdungseffekt. In general his idea of specifically national characteristics seems a bit strained (he uses Manning's Her Privates We as an example of how English writers were saturated with Shakespeare; but Frederic Manning was an Australian).There are several more such quibbles I could adduce, but none of them stopped me enjoying Fussell's arguments, most of which are brilliantly constructed. He is especially convincing on the pervasive influence of the Oxford Book of Verse on contemporary patterns of speech and thought, and he has a fantastic ability to spot poetic echoes buried in the most unlikely places. When CE Montague writes of one destroyed battalion, ‘Seasons returned, but not to that battalion returned the spirit of delight in which it had first learnt to soldier together…’, perhaps it is not too difficult to discern the presence of Milton's ‘Thus with the year / Seasons return, but not to me returns / Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn…’. But Fussell also finds parallels to both Sassoon's ‘The Kiss’ and Owen's ‘Arms and the Boy’ in Bret Harte's ‘What the Bullet Sang’ – and there are other, even more obscure examples.An American, he seems fascinated by the extent to which the idea of ‘English Literature’ was a part of daily life for so many British soldiers, and he gathers a great deal of evidence from letters and diaries showing how common this was among all ranks.Carrington once felt ‘a studious fit’ and sent home for some Browning. ‘At first,’ he says, ‘I was mocked in the dugout as a highbrow for reading “The Ring and the Book”, but saying nothing I waited until one of the scoffers idly picked it up. In ten minutes he was absorbed, and in three days we were fighting for turns to read it, and talking of nothing else at meals.’Perhaps the most interesting chapter for me was the one about the homoeroticism of war writing, which examines certain tropes in First World War literature and traces them back to the influence of Housman, the Aesthetes and the Uranians, with their veneration of wounded or dying soldier ‘lads’, forever stripping off and bathing in handy streams. Here and elsewhere, Fussell follows the variations forward in time as well, to modern war literature, where he sees Heller's Catch 22 and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as especially representative. For him, this style of heavily ironised, conspiratorial writing has its roots in the Western Front: ‘Prolonged trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama, which I take to be a primary mode in modern writing.’Well, maybe. I enjoyed seeing the argument made even if I'm not sure I believe it.Fussell himself fought in Europe the Second World War and was awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart; in a certain sense this book is personal, and it has to do with exploring the gap between ideas of war and the reality. The way he reacted to the fighting in Alsace was in some sense (so at least he seems to be arguing) pre-moulded by society's experience of the Somme and Paschendaele. And indeed, like many other writers I've encountered recently, Fussell notes that one can easily ‘conceive of the events running from 1914 to 1945 as another Thirty Years' War and the two world wars as virtually a single historical episode.’
    • 4/5
      He wanders a bit and sometimes has a clever ( perhaps he would call it ironic) tone that seems frivolous in light of what he deals with, but ultimately the book delivers. A view of how these second rank authors (Sassoon, Graves, Blunden, et al)! Have a power and importance because of what they lived through. I sometimes questioned whether WW1 was really so different, so epoch-changing - after all Sherman had called war hell half a century before,, the 100 years War was grisly and long too, but WW1 combines scale, destructive power and at least some sense of random pointlessness in its own unique way. Intriguing points include: dawn and sunset only feature as objects of admiration and poetising from the mid 19th century, scarcely appear in shakespeare ( i had to google check that and it seems true); 1914 was a unique high point in the valuing of Eng Lit, both the upper classes steeped in it and the lower classes seeing it as a road to self-improvement. The critical apparatus mainly Northrop Frye, seems irrelevant and i was glad to see him agreeing with me in his afterword- itself one of the best parts of the book. His scholarly knowledge of the texts including changes in different editions could be pedantic but is in fact revealing and throws light on the changing cultural attitudes of our times, esp towards homosexuality. The section on the homoerotic is disturbing and nuanced - the vulnerability of male flesh!
    • 5/5
      With the 100 year anniversary of World War One upon us, there has been an outpouring of new books on the war. Some of these are very good indeed, but reading a few new ones drew me back to this classic. I think it may be the best book I have ever read on the War, for two reasons. First, while the book is mostly about the war in literature and memory, Fussell captures and shows the actual day-to-day experience of the soldiers in the trenches more vividly than anything else I have read. He was in combat in Europe World War II, so he knew things in visceral terms that non- combatants don't know (and, as he points out, very often did not and do not want to know). Also, while much of his research was literary, the rest of it was about as immediate as you can get: he spent three months in a room at the Imperial War Museum, reading the Museum's (unsorted) archive of papers of the British troops in World War I. In so doing, he says, "For three months I lived in the trenches with the British soldiery, accompanying them on raids on the German trenches across the way, consoling myself with their rum, pursuing and crunching lice in my trouser seams, and affecting British phlegm as they jumped the bags and dashed directly into machine gun fire." The day to day experience he conveys is horrible, claustrophobic, and increasingly pointless. Soldiers on both sides began to believe that the war would never end; "the war", indeed, begins to seem a great pitiless machine that chews up rank after rank of men, and spits out corpses. This is not a new thought -- no one who has read much about the War is going to believe that trench life was fun. But Fussell conveys more strongly than anyone else I have read just how awful, and endless, it was. He intended his description to make war look horrible, and it does.Second, Fussell's most important literary observation, it seems to me, is less about literature per se than about a way of thinking -- the modern way of thinking, if you will. He goes through key themes as they appeared in the writings of several major authors of the War. What emerges overall, however, is a sense that for many the ability to believe in ideals was killed in the war, shifting the postwar world to an attitude of pessimism and irony. Many have criticized Fussell's focus on a small group of British writers, but I think his point is still valid. The First World War made it impossible for thinking people to believe in human progress, or in the basic goodness of humankind. In the century since then, it has been too easy to remain disillusioned. This is a terrific book, for those whose interests are primarily historical, as well as for those who have literary inclinations. Read it.
    • 4/5
      An incredibly thorough look at the British literary and cultural experience of the Great War, and how this shaped modernism and the rest of our culture ever since. Reading some excellent weblog retrospectives on WWI around Armistice Day turned me on to this one.
    • 5/5
      A masterful work- changed forever my way of looking at both war and the writing on war.
    • 5/5
      an unforgettable and seminal book
    • 4/5
      Fussell takes us through various aspects of World War I, especially focusing on how the reality of the war differed from the offical version of it. He compares soldiers' experiences through their interviews, diaries, letters, etc. with the general, sanitized packaged version.
    • 5/5
      I don't know of any other book quite like this one. Fussell shows how the culture--a highly literary one--from which British soldiers came shaped their perceptions of the first world war. The collision between industrialized mass killing and British reverence for older traditions of heroism, self-sacrifice, and the pastoral is brilliantly explicated here.