ABSTRACT
Although there were intellectual precursors for modern memory before the Great War, it was this catastrophe and its mnemonic, archetypal character that was the shaping experience. Kennington’s picture summarizes the mood of 1915, when Adlestrop was written: a sense of a watershed. Loss affected whole communities (e.g. Bradford and its ‘Pals Battalion’ in 1916) and total war gradually civilianized the experience, through conscription. The role of ‘place’ in war literature (e.g. where soldiers were) is stressed, and the relation of the war to modernity, modernism and identity, is illustrated by Eliot’s The Waste Land, by the creation of memorials, including the sculpture of Kollwitz and the expressionist art of Otto Dix. As a modern war, its social critics, Paul Fussell to Jay Winter and other analysts (Hynes), provoke controversy: these relate to diction and the iconography of mourning and memorials – they reveal the tension of modernism with traditional images and values, and the war poets reflect both. Finally, the idea of the Great War as ‘myth’ is critiqued in relation to the art and literature of 1914–18 and beyond, and subsequent postnational memory work.
