Literature/ Personal Narratives / Poetry
All Quiet on the Western Front by Call Number: 833 R384ixw 1983Publication Date: 1981Published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front presents a strong antiwar perspective. It does not spare its readers from the horrors encountered in the trenches. Erich Maria Remarque provides the voice of Germany’s lost generation. This maybe the best known of all the Great War novels. It is a must read for any would be World War One scholar.
The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War by Call Number: 821.912 C178 2013ISBN: 9781107018235Publication Date: 2013-11-18The poetry of the First World War remains a singularly popular and powerful body of work. This Companion brings together leading scholars in the field to re-examine First World War poetry in English at the start of the centennial commemoration of the war. It offers historical and critical contexts, fresh readings of the important soldier-poets, and investigations of the war poetry of women and civilians, Georgians and Anglo-American modernists and of poetry from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the former British colonies. The volume explores the range and diversity of this body of work, its rich afterlife and the expanding horizons and reconfiguration of the term 'First World War Poetry'. Complete with a detailed chronology and guide to further reading, the Companion concludes with a conversation with three poets - Michael Longley, Andrew Motion and Jon Stallworthy - about why and how the war and its poetry continue to resonate with us.
The Flower of Battle by Call Number: 823.912 C388fISBN: 1883642051Publication Date: 1996-05-01A masterfully researched resurrection of the lives and works of twelve mostly forgotten British novelists who came out of World War I, "The Flower of Battle is a sort of new Johnsonian Lives of the Poets, unsurpassed, perhaps unsurpassable" (Times Literary Supplement). It also serves as a surprisingly rich history of the war. "No one venturing onto the territory in the future will be able to dispense with a copy in their knapsack" (Christopher Hitchens in the Washington Post).
Good-Bye to All That by Call Number: 940.48 G776g 1989ISBN: 9780385093309Publication Date: 1958-02-01In this autobiography, first published in 1929, poet Robert Graves traces the monumental and universal loss of innocence that occurred as a result of the First World War. Written after the war and as he was leaving his birthplace, he thought, forever, Good-Bye to All That bids farewell not only to England and his English family and friends, but also to a way of life.
In Parenthesis by Call Number: 828 J76iPublication Date: 1961David Jones, the Welsh artist and writer, published the epic work in 1937. In Parenthesis combines poetry and prose, along with a healthy dose of mythology. W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot highly praised this fictional account of Jones’ experience as an infantryman. While not well know, this is a landmark of 20th century war literature. It is a work that every serious Great War student should read.
Johnny Got His Gun by Call Number: T8675joISBN: 9780553274325Publication Date: 1984Dalton Trumbo published this anti-war novel in September 1939. The novel won one of the early National Book Awards. It is the account of a several wounded young solder trapped inside a crippled body. It is not for the faint of heart. Trumbo was blacklisted during the 1950's.
The Poems of Wilfred Owen by Call Number: 821.912 O97poPublication Date: 1986-10-01Wilfred Owen died in the closing weeks of the Great War. His poems represent the horrors of war. The majority of his poems were published after his death through the efforts of his fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon. His name is included on the war poets memorial in Westminster Abby.
Sagittarius Rising by Call Number: 940.449 L673s 2014Publication Date: 2014-05-27Sagittarius Rising is one of the best known personal narratives by a WWI fighter pilot. Cecil Lewis lied his way into the British Army's Royal Flying Corps at age sixteen and was ordered to a squadron on the Western Front only a year later. Full of infectious charm and written with the prose and pacing of a novel, Sagittarius Rising beautifully recounts Lewis's harrowing exploits in the sky alongside his wild times of partying and chasing girls while on leave in London.
Storm of Steel by Call Number: 940.414 J95sxhPublication Date: 2004-05-04First printed in 1920, Storm of Steel provides a savage, brutally frank account of the Great War from the German perspective. Jünger was one of German’s most highly decorated soldiers. He was a member of the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment advancing from a private to an officer. Jünger revised the book several times. Despite being wounded at least 14 times, he survived the war living to be over 102 years old and become one of Germany's best known writers.
Under Fire by Call Number: 843 B241fxwPublication Date: 2009-06-01Henri Barbusse's Under Fire: The Story of a Squad (in the original French Le Feu: journal d'une escouade) was one of the first novels about World War I. Published at the end of 1916, it was based on Barbusse's experiences as a French soldier on the Western Front. The novel, written primarily as the episodic journal entries of an unknown narrator, follows a French squad in the brutal face of the German Invasion. This work had a great effect on writers such as Graves, Sassoon and Hemingway.
Undertones of War by Call Number: 940.412 B658u 2007Publication Date: 2007First published in 1928, this personal narrative is quiet and understated. The work covers Blunden's time as an officer in France where he took part in Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele. A selection of his poetry concludes the work. In later life Blunden taught poetry at Oxford. his name is included on the war poets memorial in Westminster Abby.
The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon by Call Number: 821.912 S252wISBN: 9780571130108Publication Date: 1983-01-01For "The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon," Sir Rupert Hart-Davis has arranged the poems as far as possible in the order of their composition. A useful Biographical Table is also included, so that students, scholars, and other readers can trace the movement of the soldier alongside the mind of the poet. Fourteen of the poems in this volume are published for the first time.
Women Writers and World War I by Call Number: 940.308 L754ISBN: 0805788581Publication Date: 1995-08-01Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf are only a few literary luminaries among the vast number of women who wrote about World War I. But their ranks also include more ordinary writers, who felt compelled to write about their often extraordinary experiences - as nurses, ambulance drivers, munitions workers and more - during the war. This text explores the literary, social and psychological themes that emerge from the writing of women from all walks of life. Their diaries, letters, newspaper and magazine pieces, short stories and novels document their powerful and complex response to what remains one of the most tumultuous periods in history.
Some Desperate Glory by Call Number: 940.431 V365s 1988ISBN: 9780805006711Publication Date: 1988-05-01Edwin Campion Vaughan was not a writer by trade. However, his diary is an outstanding firsthand account of trench warfare. The book was not published until 1981 long after Vaughan’s death in 1931.
Art and Artists
- Artstor (images, photos, etc.) This link opens in a new windowStarting Points: Otto Dix. Wyndham Lewis, Eric Kennington, John Singer Sargent, Käthe Kollwitz: Max Beckmann, Christopher Richard, Wynne Nevinson
- Art : International Encyclopedia of the First World WarThe International Encyclopedia of the First World War” is an English-language virtual reference work on the First World War. The multi-perspective, open-access knowledge base is the result of an international collaborative project involving more than 1,000 authors, editors, and partners from over fifty countries.
- Art of the First World War - WeimarThis blog site includes a large selection of war art and poems from German, British, French and Italian sources. It does an excellent job of demonstrating the various art styles used to record the war.
- British Art of the First World WarSeries of selection of images from the Great Britain's Imperial War Museum collection. While IWM collection is extensive, the web site could be smother to navigate.
- Picturing World War I: America's First Official War Artists, 1918-1919Smithsonian website provides access to images from official United States war artist of World War One.
- Art and Survival in First World War Britain by Call Number: 709.41 S584aISBN: 9780333425244Publication Date: 1988
- Art and the Great War byCall Number: 709.4 G164a Curio CollectionPublication Date: 1919Published a year after the war's end, this over sized volume provides contemporary100 illustrations. It is house in Special Collections and Archives.
Art and War by Call Number: E-BookISBN: 9781845112363Publication Date: 2006-11-24This is a truly encyclopedic survey of artists' responses - both 'official' and personal - to 'the horrors of war'. "Art and War" reveals the sheer diversity of artists' portrayals of this most devastating aspect of the human condition - from the 'heroic' paintings of Benjamin West and John Singer Sargent to brutal and iconic works by artists from Goya to Picasso, and the equally oppositional work of Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and others who reacted with fury to the Vietnam War. Laura Brandon pays particular attention to work produced in response to World War I and World War II, as well as to more recent art and memorial work by artists as diverse as Barbara Kruger, Alfredo Jarr and Maya Lin. She looks finally to the reactions of contemporary artists such as Langlands and Bell to the US invasion in 2001 of Afghanistan and the 'War on Terror'.
A Bitter Truth: Avant-garde Art and the Great War by Call Number: 704.944 C793bPublication Date: 1994-07-27It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth. - Paul Nash, 1918, at Passchendaele.
