The poetry of the First World War has come to dominate our understanding of its literature, while genres such as the short story, which are just as vital to the literary heritage of the era, have largely been neglected. In this study, Ann-Marie Einhaus challenges deeply embedded cultural conceptions about the literature of the First World War using a corpus of several hundred short stories that, until now, have not undergone any systematic critical analysis. From early wartime stories to late twentieth-century narratives - and spanning a wide spectrum of literary styles and movements - Einhaus's work reveals a range of responses to the war through fiction, from pacifism to militarism. Going beyond the household names of Owen, Sassoon and Graves, Einhaus offers scholars and students unprecedented access to new frontiers in twentieth-century literary studies.
• The first comprehensive study of the short fiction of the First World War • Opens up a prolific and fruitful new area of research in early twentieth-century and modernist literary studies • Extensive bibliography of hitherto unexplored primary material • Covers a wide range of short stories from 1914 to 2000
Contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Canon, genre, experience, and their implied reader; 2. The war in the magazines; 3. Post-war publication and anthologisation; 4. Negotiating disaster in popular forms; 5. Narrative rehearsals of moral and ideological alternatives; 6. Commemorative narratives and post-war stories; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
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