ABSTRACT
One important cultural effect of the social and political upheavals caused by war in the twentieth century has been the production of thousands of literary texts which attempt to record and make sense of individuals' experiences of warfare. It is a reasonable generalization to assert that the vast majority of fictional works about the Second World War are grounded in documentary realism. War, by its massively destructive nature, inevitably causes radical transformations, to people and other sentient beings, societies, landscapes and objects, natural or man-made. Most chroniclers of warfare are aware of this phenomenon, though some strive to represent the effects of death, mutilation and desolation in memorable and unbearable detail. The fantastic invariably involves transformations that infringe the ontological categories and physical laws which govern the reader's universe. Ravage clearly echoes Marshal Petain's celebration of alleged rustic virtues and his critique of perverted culture, although its environmentalist message is more immediately apparent and appealing to twenty-first-century readers.
