The last soldier who saw trench action in the Great War died in 2009. With his passing, all direct memory of the horror of that war ceased—memory became history. But Brian Kennedy argues that our collective need to grieve the horrors of the Great War still remains.

In this wide-ranging book, Kennedy looks at a variety of fiction recently written about World War I, from Jacqueline Winspear’s Birds of a  Feather to Pat Barker’s Regeneration, from Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road to Timothy Findley’s The Wars, with many other books besides. He considers the traditional stories and tropes of the war, along with modern revisionings, the role of women in the war, and even Irish issues and the divisions within the British Empire. In the end, he argues persuasively that the cultural process of grieving concerns both the fear of forgetting and the need to build a narrative arc to contain events that shaped the past century and continue to shape the present.

How do we remember unthinkably awful events such as the “The War to End All Wars”? In this book, Kennedy weaves together trauma studies, personal testimony, and creative fiction to suggest that our obsessive retelling of its stories turns the trap of individual memory into the consolation of communication: social, shared, constantly present. If time blurs the pain but preserves the glamour of a catastrophe, then the Great War, in its many literary revivals, becomes more potent as the eyewitnesses disappear. A very good and scary study.

–Caryl Emerson, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University

Traumatic in a defining way, the Great War continually returns to haunt our sense of how to Modern / 20th Century imagine the unimaginable. Brian Kennedy’s excellent book offers critical readings of writers who attend both to the Great War’s history and to its imaginative quandary: once the war moves beyond living memory, what exactly is being remembered, and what forgotten? Thanks to Kennedy’s nuanced approach, the war’s meaning for contemporary creative writing is rendered memorable in its own way.

–Peter Hitchcock, Professor of English, City University of New York