The Great War and Modern Memory

Paul Fussell’s detailed historical study The Great War and Modern Memory explores World War I through its effect on literature and the arts, as the idea of progress was dashed and much of what we consider modernity began from the wreckage of this conflict. As Henry James would write the day after the British entered the war:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.  

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