Examples of First World War: War Literature
Uploaded by curious030 on Mar 19, 2007
Aufbaumodul Literature II
by
Georg M.
Winter term
Content
1 Introduction………………………………………………………………4
1.2 Importance of women’s war-writing………………………………………..5
2 All Quiet on the Western Front…………………………………….5
2.2 The meaning of language…………………………………………………..6
2.3 Mutation of Baumer due to the War………………………………………..6
3 Comradeship as commonness in the two novels…………15
4 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….17
5 References……………………………………………………………….19
1. Introduction
The First World War inspired an outpouring of writing – both from Europe and from across the western world. The conflict has established itself in collective memory: in the eighty-nine years since the armistice the long-term significance of the war has taken shape and the written records of the war have become part of the political and literary histories of the century. For much of this time the tradition of war writing was seen as belonging to men: but for many women also the war was the catalyst for creating a unique perspective and for developing a public voice. This seminar paper bears witness to the Novel “Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War“, (1930), written by Helen Zenna Smith and to the Novel “All Quiet On The Western Front“, (1929) written by Erich Maria Remarque.
Above all, this seminar paper doesn’t deal with all the well existing varieties of ways in which women on both sides participated in the First World War. Part of the significance of women’s writing on the war lies in charting the new social roles which they found – a topic which has been explored thoroughly and is relatively well known. Certainly, any adaptations of that topic which omitted the literary realisation of the experience of nursing, for example, would be justly criticised as incomplete. Of equal importance, however, are the accounts of women’s struggle on the home front, their experiences of becoming autonomous, running a house or leaving it to do paid work, managing money, driving cars or travelling abroad to visit the front. The seminar paper intends to reveal the ways in which women took up direct positions in relation to the war.
It gives an example of women’s writing and to the ways in which the war gave women of diverse conditions an opportunity to develop new means of self-expression. As a consequence, it asks to reconsider what can be understood by “war writing”. Unmediated reportage and narratives of scenes of war, central though they are to this corpus, constitute only one of its aspects. It is through this range of writing that we can begin to recognise the significance of the First World War for the new developments in women’s writing this century.
1.2 Importance...