The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered. Beyond Modern Memory. Ed. Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout.

When a book title contains certain keywords, readers’ expectations rise. The title to Patrick J. Quinn’s and Steven Trout’s collection of essays on literary responses to the first world war, in fact, offers two such signals: “Reconsidered” and “Beyond” both announce the critical and openly revisionary stance that they take towards existing studies of the subject. And what is more, the final term “Modern Memory” clearly points to the previous book, the territory of which the present book sets out to remap and transcend, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. First published in 1975 by Oxford University Press, this has long served as a most authoritative, resourceful and readable study of war experience in writing and has, by virtue of its prominence and citability, effectively mapped out the canon of the English war memoirists, with Sassoon, Graves, Blunden and Owen occupying centre space. Surely one can agree to Quinn’s and Trout’s claim in their introduction that the time has come to reassess this literary legacy in view of recent critical developments that have taught us to be wary of canonical exclusions through questioning the power politics in national or gender notions no less than in the constructedness of cultural memory.

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