Workshop leaders: Myrthel Van Etterbeeck (KU Leuven) and Madelein Descamps
Forgotten fiction: looking beyond the canon of World War One literature
In Blackadder Goes Fourth, a comedy series in which all the clichés about the British war experience are present, World War One is succinctly summarised as “the mud, the noise, the endless poetry”. Yet, when we think about war literature it are always the same names that pop up. World War One may have given rise to a vast range of literary reactions but the great bulk of this material has not come down to us. Academic and popular attention has tended to focus on the war boom books at the end of the twenties written mainly by male (ex)combatants. Based on these texts one can conclude that the war marked a significant shift in cultural perceptions and artistic representations of war. And that participants moved from wide eyed and idealistic to wearied disillusioned men well versed in irony.
However this narrow focus ignores more traditional works and equates war with combat thereby excluding popular literature, civilian authors and the perspective of the home-front or, in the case of Northern France and Belgium, the occupied country.
In this interactive workshop we wish to go beyond the canon and explore lesser known works: Why were they forgotten? Are they even worth remembering? Should war literature be a synonym for front-literature? How do these poems and books represent war? What can they tell us about the past?
These and other questions will be addressed throughout the course of the workshop by means of specific examples from different national contexts.
In Blackadder Goes Fourth, a comedy series in which all the clichés about the British war experience are present, World War One is succinctly summarised as “the mud, the noise, the endless poetry”. Yet, when we think about war literature it are always the same names that pop up. World War One may have given rise to a vast range of literary reactions but the great bulk of this material has not come down to us. Academic and popular attention has tended to focus on the war boom books at the end of the twenties written mainly by male (ex)combatants. Based on these texts one can conclude that the war marked a significant shift in cultural perceptions and artistic representations of war. And that participants moved from wide eyed and idealistic to wearied disillusioned men well versed in irony.
However this narrow focus ignores more traditional works and equates war with combat thereby excluding popular literature, civilian authors and the perspective of the home-front or, in the case of Northern France and Belgium, the occupied country.
In this interactive workshop we wish to go beyond the canon and explore lesser known works: Why were they forgotten? Are they even worth remembering? Should war literature be a synonym for front-literature? How do these poems and books represent war? What can they tell us about the past?
These and other questions will be addressed throughout the course of the workshop by means of specific examples from different national contexts.
Myrthel Van Etterbeeck completed her Masters degree in Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven. Presently she is working on a PhD under the supervision of Elke Brems and Reine Meylaerts, as part of the Belspo Brain project “Recognition and resentment: experiences and memories of the Great War in Belgium”. Her research focuses on the experience and memory of World War I through the lens of Belgian literature. It strives to analyse the relationships between the presentation of the war and Belgian identity through a comparative analysis of a corpus that consists of both French and Dutch literary works.
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Madelein Descamps is a student at the University of Ghent where she has completed a Bachelor’s degree in Literature and Linguistics with a focus on English literature. Presently, she is completing a Master’s degree in Comparative Modern Literature. Fuelled by a keen interest in the events and perception of the First World War, she decided to research English poetry from 1914 to 1918 while consciously avoiding the canonical combatant poetry that is so well-known today. Instead, her research concerns those voices often ignored: for her bachelor paper, she focused on the Indian experience of the war as India was a British colony struggling for independence at the time. She is currently researching women’s pacifist poetry for her thesis, especially its effectiveness and why it deserves the attention men’s pacifist poetry has received.
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