The First World War has left a lasting legacy on British cultural memory up until today. Redefining modern warfare, the horrors of the trenches and the first gas attacks led to bloodshed of hitherto unknown dimensions. And from among the soldiers who actually returned to Britain alive many suffered from shellshock and its irreversible psychological damage. Apart from the many devastating personal effects, the 'Great War' rearranged European society in ways that profoundly disrupted established political alliances and eventually caused conflicts not only between Britons and Germans, but also between soldiers and civilians, men and women as well as the old and the young.
Throughout the last 100 years, this defining period of twentieth-century Europe has triggered countless cultural and literary representations of war and trauma. Among them are works as artistically diverse as the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves' autobiography Goodbye to all that, Virginia Woolf's post-war novel Mrs. Dalloway, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, Pat Barker's historiographic metafiction Regeneration Trilogy, Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child, as well as various movies like Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, Christian Carion's Merry Christmas and, more recently, Steven Spielberg's War Horse, to name but a few.
Focusing on the iconic figure of the soldier-poet, this seminar traces the social and cultural changes brought about by the First World War, thereby touching on issues as varied as 'heroism', patriotism, shell shock, comradeship, women's suffrage, pastoral and anti-pastoral poetry, and the authenticity / the constructedness of the heroic image of the soldier-poet.

Please prepare:

Walter, George, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. London: Penguin, 2012. (selected poems)

Regeneration [a.k.a. Behind the Lines]. Dir. Gillies MacKinnon. Perf. Jonathan Pryce, James Wilby, Jonny Lee Miller. Artificial Eye, 1997. OR:
Barker, Pat. Regeneration. London, Penguin, 2008.

Graves, Robert. Goodbye to all that. London: Penguin, 2012.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Penguin, 2012.

Hollinghurst, Alan. The Stranger's Child. London: Pan Macmillan, 2011.