Price: $22.00

Format:
Paperback 384 pp.
14 halftones, 201 mm x 127 mm

ISBN-10:
0195133323

ISBN-13:
9780195133325

Publication date:
February 2000

Imprint: OUP US

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The Great War and Modern Memory

Paul Fussell

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 afterword and a suggested further reading list. As this classic work draws upon several disciplines--among them literary studies, military history, cultural criticism, and historical inquiry--it will continue to appeal to students, scholars, and general readers of various backgrounds.

Reviews

• "Paul Fussell's Great War and Modern Memory introduced an entirely new and creative way of writing both about war and the literature it generates. It has been a profound influence on historians and literary critics alike. It is a model of intelligence and fine writing and will remain a key text in our culture for decades to come."--John Keegan
• Praise for the previous edition
• "Skillful, compassionate....An important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds."--Frank Kermode, The New York Times Book Review
• "One doesn't know quite where to begin to praise this book in which literary and historical materials, in themselves not unfamiliar, are brought together in a probing, sympathetic, and finally illuminating fashion. It is difficult to think of a scholarly work in recent years that has more deeply engaged the reader at both the intellectual and emotional level."--The New Republic
• "A learned and well-balanced book that is also bright and sensitive....A last irony leaps from these pages: the men of the First World War were heroes as great as the cast of the Iliad, yet their words destroyed the concept of themselves, of all warriors, and of war itself as heroic."--The New Yorker