Postcards from the trenches - Allyson Booth

Booth offers a complex portrait of the relation between British Great War culture and modernist writings. She notes that unlike civilians, modernist writers and combatants shared a concern with the divide between language and experience, and draws connections between the sensibility of the modernist writer and the soldier, particularly regarding efforts to describe dying and the dead.
Her analysis extends to memorials, posters, and architecture of the Great War,though her emphasis is on literary works by Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, Vera Brittain, and others.

This is some of the most interesting interdisciplinary work on World War One-or on any subject, for that matter-that I have seen. It is an important `sequel' to Fussell's still influential Great War and Modern Memory, except that Booth's book, which is on modernist memory, sheds much more light on the particularities of modernism. Throughout, this book offers stunning readings of individual texts or moments.
Susan Schweik, University of California, Berkeley