Assignment Paper :-108 (The American Literature)
Name :- Aarti Bhupatbhai Sarvaiya
Batch :- M.A. Sem. 2 (2022-2024)
Enrollment N/o. :- 4069206420220027
Roll N/o. :- 01
Subject Code & Paper N/o. :- 22401 Paper 108: The American Literature
Email Address :- aartisarvaiya7010@gmail.com
Submitted to :- Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English – Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University – Bhavnagar – 364001
Date of Submission :- 31 March, 2023
(2022-2024
An effect of the world war 1, in literary writers
Introduction :-
World War I, the war that was originally expected to be “over by Christmas,” dragged on for four years with a grim brutality brought on by the dawn of trench warfare and advanced weapons, including chemical weapons. The horrors of that conflict altered the world for decades – and writers reflected that shifted outlook in their work. As Virginia Woolf would later write, “Then suddenly, like a chasm in a smooth road, the war came.”
Early works were romantic sonnets of war and death.
Among the first to document the “chasm” of the war were soldiers themselves. At first, idealism persisted as leaders glorified young soldiers marching off for the good of the country.
English poet Rupert Brooke, after enlisting in Britain’s Royal Navy, wrote a series of patriotic sonnets, including “The Soldier,” which read:
"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England."
Brooke, after being deployed in the Allied invasion of Gallipoli, would die of blood poisoning in 1915.
The same year, Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, upon seeing how red poppies grew in the fields that had been ravaged by bombs and littered with bodies, wrote “In Flanders Fields.” The poem, memorialising the death of his friend and fellow soldier, would later be used by Allied militaries to recruit soldiers and raise money in selling war bonds:
"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below."
The tone of literature shifted after years of gruelling WWI combat.While both Brooke’s and McCrae’s works lent patriotic tones to the sacrifices of war early in the conflict, as time wore on, the war’s relentless horrors spawned darker reflections. Some, like English poet Wilfred Owen, saw it their duty to reflect the grim reality of the war in their work.
As Owen would write, “All a poet today can do is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful.” In “Anthem for the Doomed Youth,” Owen describes soldiers who “die as cattle” and the “monstrous anger of the guns.”
First World War Fiction - Key takeaways
• First World War Fiction refers to fictional works that are written about the First World War (1914- 1918).
• Much of First World War fiction features the following themes: the idealisation of war, the reality of war and how war affects relationships.
• The genre of First World War poetry is under the broader genre of war poetry. These poems were often written by poets who had served in the war.
• Some famous writers of First World War fiction are Ernest Hemingway, Richard Aldington and Virginia Woolf.
• One of the most famous examples of First World War poetry is Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' (1920).
An effect of the world war in Literary writers :-
The First World War (WWI) took place from 1914 to 1918. In English fiction, real-life experiences and events were drawn upon. A common theme in literature inspired by the events of the First World War is the idealisation of war versus the reality of war. Many authors and poets who created World War I fiction served in the war, so many used first-hand experiences in their works. They showed the realities of war in their work: the horror of battle and the internal struggles during warfare. They often reflected on the war as well, showing the effects of the war on soldiers’ health and personal relationships. The First World War is also known as ‘the Great War’ because it was the first great conflict in modern history that involved many countries throughout the world. Modern weaponry was used for the first time and it brought great destruction on a scale never seen before in the modern history of Europe. The First World War was a war in which trenches had to be dug because of the sustained and lethal barrage of artillery during battle.Some literature was patriotic towards the British war effort.
The First World War instilled in the young men surviving its horrors a sense of a half-life; those who walked away from the trenches sacrificed a part of themselves on Europe’s battlefields.This sense of loss was manifested most compellingly in postwar literature created by what came to be known as the Lost Gener-
ation. The Lost Generation embodied a shift in the tone of literature following the war. Specifically, the attempt to capture as well as define the physical, mental, and emotional suffering of those that survived the war.
Originally a small group of writers,over the course of the twentieth century, The Lost Generation has come to be referred to as the style or genre of postwar authors and artists. This group of writers included Ernest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and other contemporary writers. While Those authors are most commonly thought of as the Lost Generation, it did not take long for other artists apart from novelists to join the ranks of the lost, such as Percy Wyndham Lewis and Will Longstaff. These other artists added to the collective remembrance
of veterans’ trauma of the war.
Still, these original writers set the stage and created the works that veterans and civilians both most heavily identified with during the 1920s and 30s, and continued into the twentieth century with following generations. The Lost Generation’s works of literature encapsulated the collective suffering felt by many survivors of the First World War. These writers sought to explain first the part of themselves they lost on the battlefields of Europe, secondly to find a remedy for their conditions of hopelessness, disillusionment, and regret. Authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque never completely found closure after the war, while J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis experienced relief through their insertion of lived experiences into their imagined worlds.
The novels written by former soldiers were no longer just stories; they took on a deeper meaning to the authors as ways to cope with what they witnessed during the war. These direct ties to the experiences of soldiers allowed survivors of the war to more closely relate to these stories.
Ernest Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque, one American, the other German, both produced works that spoke to the collective sense of disillusionment toward
life that started during the war years and grew out into the postwar world. Their work relied on their characters’ experiences with the war and how they coped with the horrors witnessed. They did this with the use of their own war experiences both during and after the war through their writings.
Ernest Hemingway also transformed his personal war experiences into works of literature that resonated with post-war readers, veterans and civilians alike. These two both reflected the bitterness soldiers developed directed at the war and eventually toward life outside the war. Two of Hemingway’s World War I novels gave little account of the characters in the war. In The Sun Also Rises, The story follows former soldiers several
years after the war, and A Farewell to Arms, while it took place during the war, used few descriptions of the trenches and the fighting, favouring hospitals and Italian cities.
Narnia, the fictional world created by C.S. Lewis, embodied reflections of Lewis’s wartime experience both the sight of battle and the life of a soldier. This imagined land created a place for Lewis to express his war trauma in a landscape outside of reality. In several moments of Lewis’s book titled The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe, scenes of combat reflected what Lewis experienced in the trenches.
The Poems were often written by poets who had been in service during the war. The genre has poems that discuss themes like patriotism, loyalty, courage, comradeship, death and sacrifice. These poems depicted the horrifying realities of warfare, exposing them to readers and breaking through the illusions of glory and heroism young soldiers believed in.
For example, English poet Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Soldier’ (1915) is a patriotic poem. Brooke imagines an ‘English heaven’ (line 14) that will exist after he is dead. This ‘heaven’ (line 14) exists as a result of his contribution to Britain’s Royal Navy. This poem is idealistic and plays on the expectations of glory for oneself and for the country that many young soldiers believed they would obtain. It is important to note that Brooke’s poem was written at the start of the war. The patriotic tone of this poem written at the start of the war differs greatly from the critical tone of many literary works written towards the end of the war or after the war.
Richard Aldington (1892-1962), was an English writer famous for his novel Death of a Hero (1929). The novel details the story of George Winterbourne, who joins the British army at the start of WWI. Winterbourne struggles to return to everyday life and struggles with navigating his personal relationships upon his return from the war.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), was an English writer. One of her novels about the First World War is Mrs. Dalloway (1925). It focuses on post-World War society in England and the protagonist is Mrs. Dalloway. One of the characters in the novel, Septimus Smith, is a war veteran who suffers from shell shock, which is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Smith is sent to a psychiatric institute to help him, however, he commits suicide once admitted.
Conclusion :-
From First World War fiction, we can learn about the personal, social and political effects of the war. First World War fiction is a collection of the experiences of those who served in the war or those who were in proximity to the war, like soldiers' families. By showing the realities of the war, we hope to learn about the amount of damage and suffering as a result of the war. First World War fiction should serve as a lesson for us to avoid replicating such a conflict in the future. Since the war affected so many people, many could relate to the themes of loss, courage and suffering that were featured in First World War fiction.
Word Count :- 1782
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