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7 results

  • Chapter 8 - France

  • from Part II - Nations and Voices
  • Edited by Jane Potter, Oxford Brookes University
  • Book:
    A History of World War One Poetry
    Published online:
    18 January 2023
    Print publication:
    12 January 2023, pp 132-152

  • Summary

    This chapter deals with the history of the French poetry of the First Wold War. Although, like in other belligerent countries, the production of war poetry was massive between 1914 and 1918, it remains hitherto neglected by literature scholars and historians. The genre suffered from its bad reputation. Apart from a few avant-gardists like Guillaume Apollinaire, the scholarly consensus outlined the French war poetry as a chauvinistic old-fashioned flood of words with no literary or even documentary relevance in contrast with the prose written by soldier-writers. This chapter does not try to rehabilitate the French war poetry but to sketch a typology of a significative cultural phenomenon. It shows the variety of the genre between patriotism, eulogy, irony and humour, testimony, protest, and formal research.

  • 18 - Soldier-writers and poets

  • from Part V - The Social History of Cultural Life
  • Edited by Jay Winter, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the First World War
    Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    09 January 2014, pp 445-474

  • Summary

    This chapter presents an analysis of soldier-writers of the Great War. It focuses on an overview of a singular phenomenon closely linked to literary history and more generally to the political, cultural, social and economic history of the Great War. The war itself and the form that it took account for the development in most of the warring nations of this new category of soldier-writers. Daily writing, of letters or personal diaries, was certainly not understood as a literary gesture, but it favoured the emergence of front literature. The death of writers and poets was an essential element in the legitimation of war literature. Repeated references to their sacrifice reinforced the writers contribution to the war effort and gave to the cause a quasi-universal dimension. The chapter also discusses a transnational history of war literature and the soldier-writers.