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The great war and the origins of humanitarianism, 1918-1924

Barnes. She points out not only ways in which these authors have referred to and reiterated aspects of the ‘myth’ of the war, but also notes how they have gone further to help to create a postmodern memory – for example, by representing characters from the working classes, by including women as historical agents, and importantly, by engaging with the challenge of memory and the persistence of trauma. It is this self-reflexive element of their work which Renard sees as contributing distinctively to our wider fascination with the First World War. This book succeeds triumphantly in its task. It offers a brilliant overview of this vital and contested field, together with an insightful and generous reading of the selected literary texts. It is not for the intellectually faint-hearted, but will be of great interest to researchers and students concerned with the First World War, and above all its representation in literature. Historians and history students looking at memory and representation will benefit from the wider conceptual discussions here. It should also provoke further work. Since the period surveyed in this book, there has been a huge proliferation of sites of memory of the First World War: we have seen, alongside academic works, television documentaries and debates, museum exhibitions, public ceremonies and the unveiling of new memorials. Hundreds of thousands have visited, and been involved in, the construction of the sea of poppies flowing from the Tower of London; and we have seen a sustained re-validation of the idea of heroism, motivated as much by the needs of the present as by concerns about the ‘history’ of the First World War. The ‘myth’ of the war may not retain the hegemonic position in popular consciousness that it appeared to hold in the opening years of the new millennium. Renard points to another direction in her book, when she uses a quotation from the Blackadder television series to introduce her discussion of the ‘myth’ of the war. A salient feature of the postmodern is the blurring of distinctions between more and less ‘serious’ representations of the past. Public understandings of the First World War are formed now as much by television programmes and public ceremonies as by highbrow literature, or the work of academic historians. For a full and continuing analysis of ‘postmodern memory’ we need a scholar to survey the field of recent and contemporary popular representations with the humane and forensic quality which Renard has brought here to late twentieth century British fiction.