Thr short story and the first world war

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The poetry of the First World War has come to dominate our understanding of its literature, while genres such as the short story, which are just as vital to the literary heritage of the era, have largely been neglected. In this study, Ann-Marie Einhaus challenges deeply embedded cultural conceptions about the literature of the First World War using a corpus of several hundred short stories that, until now, have not undergone any systematic critical analysis. From early wartime stories to late twentieth-century narratives - and spanning a wide spectrum of literary styles and movements - Einhaus's work reveals a range of responses to the war through fiction, from pacifism to militarism. Going beyond the household names of Owen, Sassoon and Graves, Einhaus offers scholars and students unprecedented access to new frontiers in twentieth-century literary studies.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Canon, genre, experience, and their implied reader
• 2 The war in the magazines
• 3 Post-war publication and anthologisation
• 4 Negotiating disaster in popular forms
• 5 Narrative rehearsals of moral and ideological alternatives
• 6 Commemorative narratives and post-war stories
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Einhaus (Northumbria Univ.) excavates and examines noncanonical texts of the Great War, short stories in particular. By juxtaposing them against canonical works, e.g., the poetry of Wilfred Owen, she demonstrates that a much more rounded picture of British sentiment toward the war, both during and after, is achievable. Her theoretical framework concerning the difference between archival memory (lost works, likened to the contents of an attic) and active memory (canon) comes courtesy of Aleida Assmann. Einhaus is careful to distinguish between popular and modernist short stories as found in, respectively, The Strand and English Review; one of her key comparisons involves Ben Ray Redman's "The Enduring Image" and Katherine Mansfield's "The Fly." The modernist short story about war (e.g., Mansfield's), typically a character-driven slice of life expressing horror and futility, has until now, Einhaus argues, undergirded the dominant myth. However, popular fiction, though plot driven and occasionally melodramatic (and thus unpopular with scholars), often allowed fleshed-out protagonists for a broader reading public. Such short stories show that many in England believed the war to be a necessary, if painful, part of life. Einhaus's meticulous study undercuts the myth and rounds out history. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. M. W. Cox University of Pittsburgh