The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

The emphasis of A War Imagined is
mostly on the things which unite cultural
practices. Hyne's examples from various
cultural productions document the disillusioning
effect of the Somme offensive of
1916 on British consciousness. Of particular
interest is Hynes's argument that the canon
of war books constitutes a myth of the War
which was reconstructed retrospectively. A
War Imagined is an important book because
it constructs a social and cultural history
which concentrates on the way the war
impinged on the consciousness of a whole
society. Hynes analyzes not only documents
directly related to the War but also works of
major authors (Lawrence, Eliot, Pound,
Woolf) which indirectly reflect the impact
of the War on the artistic imagination. In
particular, he shows in highly complex
terms that the War came to be seen as a gap
in history, contributing to the modern conception
of history as a discontinuous
process. Hynes's approach is primarily
descriptive. Although he draws critically
sophisticated conclusions from the material
he has collected, the scope of his cultural
history leaves no room for in-depths analyses
of individual texts. The literature is
often treated quite superficially so that the
reader is unlikely to learn anything startling
about Graves or Sassoon. In addition,
Hynes's social and cultural analyses remain
fairly narrowly confined to the patterns
that emerge from the material he uses for
documentation. There is no philosophical
or theoretical concern with embattled concepts
like modernism, history, or representation.
Nevertheless A War Imagined is
undoubtedly a major text in social and cultural
history; it is lucidly argued and very
readable. It should be of interest not just to
those interested in the First World War but
to all those concerned with English culture
as such.
The comparative approach of Elizabeth
A. Marsland's The Nation's Cause is a welcome
addition to studies confined by
national boundaries. Although Marsland
quite correctly stresses the homogeneity of
this poetry, some of the more interesting
aspects of her investigation are nevertheless
the differences. It is important to realize,
for instance, that "English patriotic poets
celebrate heroic death as frequently as the
French, but with an emphasis on immortality
rather than martyrdom". Marsland
establishes both similarities and differences
through a primarily thematic approach.
Having sorted through a large body of war
poetry, she chose to arrange her material
according to familiar themes and topoi like
attitudes to the enemy, civilians, women,
heroes, martyrs, victims, death, battle,
patriotism, and so on. Although her focus
on propaganda poetry is a welcome corrective
to the popularity of protest poetry, it is
not entirely clear to what end Marsland
examines the themes of these poems.
Marsland's detailed description adds little
to our historical understanding of the
period. At best we may get a sense of the
sheer volume of aesthetically inferior
poetry which had been produced.
Although The Nation's Cause is thoroughly
researched, Marsland relies for her
critical analyses on unexamined notions of
common sense. She seems most comfortable
when paraphrasing the poetry itself;
she grows fuzzy as soon as she tries to speculate
on the socio-cultural significance of
the themes under discussions. A more theoretical
perspective might have permitted
Marsland to explore her promising subject
in more complex terms (she acknowledges
that her study "cannot be termed a work of
literary theory"). On a more basic level, her
point that poetry for and against the war
was motivated by propagandist impulses
relies once again on rather undefined categories.
She assures us that propaganda
poetry was spontaneous, overlooking the
concentrated attempt by the British government
to enlist the support of the country's
best literary minds. One would at the