When this text was first published in 1965, it offered radical perspectives on the poetry, fiction and autobiographical writing of World War I. It mapped an area of literature which remains challenging and painfully fresh despite later carnage in the 20th century, challenging because of the quality of the writers who served, and because attitudes altered so fundamentally during its four traumatic years. This substantially revised and enlarged edition restores the book as a critical and historical study of the work of those who fought: victims, such as the poets Charles Sorley, Wilfred Owen, and Issac Rosenberg; and survivors, who returned to their experiences in prose works ten or more years after it had ended, including Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sasson and Robert Graves. An account of contemporary responses to the war by civilian writers, including H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and D.H. Lawrence, is featured, and a final chapter discusses poems and novels about the war by writers born long after it was over.
