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Description

Contents

Introduction - irony, modernism and tradition - modes of interpretation; irony and modern memory, tradition triumphant - echoes of the past in war literature, modernists versus traditionalists, the middlebrow novel; the Baedeker of the memory of war, mapping out the terrain of the interwar years. Part 1 The accountability of imagination: social background and non literary occupation, the intimate world of publishing, the testimony of the "Old guard", fiction as history, writing with a purpose, the English memory of war, "Morality" as a strategy of social and political renewal, safeguarding the individual against the mob, the middle of the road. Part 2 The invisible hand of the cause: the strength of inarticulate patriotism, the enemy, disenchantment in the novels of the late 1920s and 1930s, personal war. Part 3 "Standards are Different Here" - war recasts identity: the separate world of the men at war; fear, communion with the dead, spiritual language, homefront; conscientious objectors, defining English identity against German character, women and war, a generation apart. Part 4 The quest for continuity: preserving the past; the old order reabsorption into the old pattern, military tradition. Part 5 The theatre of war - "Journey's End": the plot of "Journey's End"; journey to success; the response of the press, the experience of 2nd Lieutenant Sherriff, Sherriff's literary reconstruction of his war experience; Sherriff and Hibbert, the public-school matrix of "Journey's End", the play's title, the "war consciousness" of "Journey's End", providing a social message; simplicity as a style of life and literature, revisited rather than revived. Conclusion: summary, the centre can hold.

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