The last soldier who saw trench action in the Great War died in 2009. With his passing, all direct memory of the horror of that war ceased-memory became history. But Brian Kennedy argues that our collective need to grieve the horrors of the Great War still remains. In this wide-ranging book, he looks at a variety of fiction recently written about World War I, from Michael Morpurgo's War Horse to Pat Barker's Regeneration, from Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road to Timothy Findley's The Wars, with many other books besides. Kennedy considers the traditional stories and tropes of the war, along with modern revisionings, the role of women in the war, and even Irish issues and the divisions within the British Empire. In the end, he argues persuasively that the cultural process of grieving concerns both the fear of forgetting and the need to build a narrative arc to contain events that shaped the past century and continue to shape the present.
Brian Kennedy is Montreal-born and raised, and now teaches British and postcolonial literature as well as writing courses at Pasadena City College, California. He has PhD in contemporary British literature, and his previous publications include essays on Virginia Woolf, Henry James and Graham Greene, an edited book on California issues and books and academic articles on hockey and Canadian culture. He has held a research fellowship at Saint Mary's University, Halifax; given presentations at the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield, England; and lectured on literature at colleges in Mumbai, India. His work has been translated into Russian, Spanish,Portuguese and Dutch.
"How do we remember unthinkably awful events such as the The War to End All Wars? In this
book, Kennedy weaves together trauma studies, personal testimony, and creative fiction to suggest
that our obsessive retelling of its stories turns the trap of individual memory into the consolation of communication: social, shared, constantly present. If time blurs the pain but preserves the glamour
of a catastrophe, then the Great War, in its many literary revivals, becomes more potent as the
eyewitnesses disappear. A very good and scary study."-- Caryl Emerson, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages & Literatures, Princeton University
"Traumatic in a defining way, the Great War continually returns to haunt our sense of how to imagine the unimaginable. Brian Kennedys excellent book offers critical readings of writers who attend both to the Great Wars history and to its imaginative quandary: once the war moves beyond living memory, what exactly is being remembered, and what forgotten? Thanks to Kennedys nuanced approach, the wars meaning for contemporary creative writing is rendered memorable in its own way." -- Peter Hitchcock, Professor of English, City University of New York
