Mixing Memory and Desire: The Great War in Contemporary Commonwealth Fiction - Softcover

The last solider who served in the trenches of World War I died in 2009, and, with him, all direct memory of the horror of that war left the earth. Memory has become history, but Brian Kennedy argues that our collective need to grieve the horrors of the Great War still remains. In this wide-ranging book he looks at a variety of fiction that has been written about World War I, from Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse and Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong to Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road and Timothy Findley’s The Wars, with many other books besides. Kennedy considers the traditional stories and tropes of the war, along with modern revisionings, the role of women in the war and even Irish issues and the divisions within the British Empire.