Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Voice over
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The death of the hero
- 2 Survivors' songs
- 3 England's epic?
- 4 Who was Rupert Brooke?
- 5 Christ and the soldier
- 6 Owen's afterlife
- 7 Owen and his editors
- 8 The legacy of the Somme
- 9 The iconography of the Waste Land
- 10 War and peace
- 11 The fire from heaven
- 12 Henry Reed and the Great Good Place
- 13 The fury and the mire
- Notes
- Index
10 - War and peace
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Voice over
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The death of the hero
- 2 Survivors' songs
- 3 England's epic?
- 4 Who was Rupert Brooke?
- 5 Christ and the soldier
- 6 Owen's afterlife
- 7 Owen and his editors
- 8 The legacy of the Somme
- 9 The iconography of the Waste Land
- 10 War and peace
- 11 The fire from heaven
- 12 Henry Reed and the Great Good Place
- 13 The fury and the mire
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Central to British mythology of the First World War is the figure of the poet who descends like Orpheus into the Underworld, like Dante into the Inferno, and comes back singing of what he has seen. Several of the poets also wrote immensely successful prose accounts – sometimes lightly fictionalized – of their underworldly experience, with the result that British novels of the war have tended to be overshadowed by those memoirs and by translations of such foreign masterpieces as Henri Barbusse's Le Feu (published in English as Under Fire, 1917) and Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen Nichts Neues (published in English as All Quiet on the Western Front, 1939.) Sometimes, too, the often lethal legacy of the war in novels written after it – novels in which the violence has already occurred, as in Greek tragedy, off-stage – tends to be obscured by other events.
Virginia Woolf 's Mrs Dalloway (1925) opens in
the middle of June. The War was over, except for someone like Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite killed; but it was over; thank Heaven – over.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Survivors' SongsFrom Maldon to the Somme, pp. 128 - 145Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008