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The Great War and Modern Memory (Galaxy Books)
by Paul Fussell
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (1977-02-03)
ISBN: 0195021711
EAN: 9780195021714
Dewy Decimal #: 820.93
Paperback: 378 pages
SKU: S06728-0217
Condition: New
Comments: New Book. New condition. Ships same day or next in a bubble mailer. Enjoy,
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Fussell vividly explores the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, focusing on the various literary means by which it has been remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized.
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Customer Reviews
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Tolkien: MIA.
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-07-03
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Another must-read for anyone interested in great literature. From the sublime to the mundane, Fussell is most fascinating. This can be a fairly quick read -- perhaps a long weekend for most, but then you will find yourself returning to re-read certain chapters, and it will definitely end up on your desk as a reference book. I was most pleased to see many references to the Bloomsbury Group, but I was surprised that there was no mention of JRR Tolkien whose The Lord of the Rings, I believe, had its genesis in the trenches of WWI.
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10 Stars, Not 5
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-06-22
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book is some 25 years old, but still shares with Edward Said's "Orientalism" the prize for best literary criticism. Unlike Said's book, however, Fussell's analysis has never been attacked or questioned; it has only gained in stature over the years. It is, quite simply, a beautiful book and was rightly recognized when it first appeared as an instant classic. It was written at a time when historians were just beginning to crawl around old battlefields looking for new ways to tell the story of war. Fussell got down and dirty in the trenches of France and came back with a story of how the gruesome battles of WWI shaped a generation of English writers and artists. There is not much new that can be said about this superb book, except that there has been no better book written since its publication by an American on literature.
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Rating  (1)
Date: 2007-06-02
2 out of 55 customers found this reveiw helpful
One must be a drooling English major to read, much less, enjoy this book.
It has nothing to do with reality.
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An important book in a time of war
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-03-09
9 out of 9 customers found this reveiw helpful
On one level, Fussell writes about World War I, and his unsparing depiction of the industrialized killing in this first "modern" war will acquaint readers with a war that now seems very distant. On the second level, he shows how British World War I soldiers viewed their experience through the literary and popular culture they brought to the trenches--through ideas of the pastoral, of epic sacrifice, of manly strength and beauty. Fussell brilliantly links "The Oxford Book of English Verse" and the battlefields of France. His discussion of how the poppy came to be a symbol of this war is alone worth the price of the book. Finally, and most interestingly, there is Fussell's idea that this particular past is not distant at all. He not only points out how accounts of the second World War were influenced by accounts of the first, but suggests how some of the ways we currently think about war are shaped by the Great War. One wonders, in the midst of it, what myths of our own we bring to our conceptions of the War On Terror.
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Clearly one of the best books written on WWI
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-01-18
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
This classic by Paul Fussell should be required reading on most college campuses. His prose is impeccable. I have read every Fussell book I can get my hands on. He is one of the best.
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