Abstract
Critics often wonder how much our perception of the war which was to be the last of wars has been determined by literary representations following memoirs and historical accounts. Our article is devoted to the study of contemporary representations of the Great War in France (Le Monument by Claude Duneton), in Great Britain (Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore) and in English Canada (Deafening by Frances Itani), in which the vision of the apocalypse is filtered through the home fronts. The fictionalisation of the social tensions caused by the war far from its central stage helps the reader discover the total dimension of the conflict, affecting both the individual and the community, destroying the established order, on the social and cultural levels, as well as on the mental and ethical ones. If, at the turn of the twenty-first century, military history is still a source of inspiration for contemporary fiction writers, the home front is often fictionalised as well. This is a proof of an ethical shift that resituates the impact of the war far from the battlefield. The contemporary writers under consideration explore the family trauma experienced by those who remain without news of their sons, fathers, husbands or beloved, and who conceptualise the war through official reports or censored letters sent from the front.
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Notes
- 1.
As defined by Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander 2004, p. 1). Events mediated as cultural trauma cause epistemological tensions and constant efforts at reinterpretation.
- 2.
- 3.
On the support of soldiers’ families during the First World War in Canada, see Morton (2004).
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This research was supported by grant DEC–2013/11/B/HS2/02871 from the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki).
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Branach-Kallas, A., Sadkowski, P. (2018). Sharing Grief: Local and Peripheral Dimensions of the Great War in Contemporary French, British and Canadian Literature. In: Barker, A., Pereira, M., Cortez, M., Pereira, P., Martins, O. (eds) Personal Narratives, Peripheral Theatres: Essays on the Great War (1914–18). Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66851-2_8
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