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The Great War and Modern Memory | 
 enlarge | Author: Paul Fussell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $19.99
Buy Used: $7.98
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Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 34009
Media: Paperback
Edition: 25 Anv
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 2.7
ISBN: 0195133323
Dewey Decimal Number: 820.9358
EAN: 9780195133325
ASIN: 0195133323
Publication Date: March 2, 2000
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Product Description
The year 2000 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Great War and Modern Memory, winner of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and recently named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books. Fussell's landmark study of WWI remains as original and gripping today as ever before: a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. 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 most effectively memorialized WWI as an historical experience with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning. For this special edition, the author has prepared a new introduction and afterword.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...
 The rich literature of the Great War December 15, 2008
This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of American military affairs. Paul Fussell's award winning book, The Great War and Modern Memory, elaborates on how the "idea" of the "Great War" was used not only by participants, but also by novelists too young to serve, in order to shape and influence "post-modern literature." Fussell's comprehensive examination of unpublished war memoirs, fictional works, poetry, letters, propaganda, and journalistic accounts, provided a fascinating narrative for how soldiers' experiences in the Great War were remembered and transmitted. For example, he did an admirable job of using the diaries and literature of America's "doughboys" to express their reactions to the "crucible" of war. An American soldier in the battle of Saint-Mihiel, Eugene Kennedy poignantly recorded in his diary the sense of helplessness soldiers often felt in war when he wrote how he was, "Stumbling through dark, dripping woods, guided only by his hand on the pack of the man ahead." Fussell also found that our modern lexicon was replete with phrases and words from the Great War. For example, "The phrase No Man's Land has haunted the imagination for sixty years, although its original associations with fixed positions and static warfare are eroding."
Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history.
Tolkien: MIA. July 3, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Another must-read for anyone interested in great literature. From the sublime to the mundane, Fussell is most fascinating. This can be a fairly quick read -- perhaps a long weekend for most, but then you will find yourself returning to re-read certain chapters, and it will definitely end up on your desk as a reference book. I was most pleased to see many references to the Bloomsbury Group, but I was surprised that there was no mention of JRR Tolkien whose The Lord of the Rings, I believe, had its genesis in the trenches of WWI.
10 Stars, Not 5 June 22, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book is some 25 years old, but still shares with Edward Said's "Orientalism" the prize for best literary criticism. Unlike Said's book, however, Fussell's analysis has never been attacked or questioned; it has only gained in stature over the years. It is, quite simply, a beautiful book and was rightly recognized when it first appeared as an instant classic. It was written at a time when historians were just beginning to crawl around old battlefields looking for new ways to tell the story of war. Fussell got down and dirty in the trenches of France and came back with a story of how the gruesome battles of WWI shaped a generation of English writers and artists. There is not much new that can be said about this superb book, except that there has been no better book written since its publication by an American on literature.
 Normal June 2, 2007
2 out of 57 found this review helpful
One must be a drooling English major to read, much less, enjoy this book.
It has nothing to do with reality.
An important book in a time of war March 9, 2007
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
On one level, Fussell writes about World War I, and his unsparing depiction of the industrialized killing in this first "modern" war will acquaint readers with a war that now seems very distant. On the second level, he shows how British World War I soldiers viewed their experience through the literary and popular culture they brought to the trenches--through ideas of the pastoral, of epic sacrifice, of manly strength and beauty. Fussell brilliantly links "The Oxford Book of English Verse" and the battlefields of France. His discussion of how the poppy came to be a symbol of this war is alone worth the price of the book. Finally, and most interestingly, there is Fussell's idea that this particular past is not distant at all. He not only points out how accounts of the second World War were influenced by accounts of the first, but suggests how some of the ways we currently think about war are shaped by the Great War. One wonders, in the midst of it, what myths of our own we bring to our conceptions of the War On Terror.
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