History, Department of
Date of this Version
April 2006
Abstract
This paper examines the basic characteristics of representation of conflict of those European prose authors whose novels about World War I are directly connected – but not identified – with personal experiences of waging trench warfare. It would be impossible to examine all the author-soldiers’ fictional accounts of World War I, but in order to give as rounded an image as possible I will be examining authors that come from different parts of Europe. The one is from Germany, Erich Maria Remarque, whose influential novel Im Westen Nichts Neues (translated as All Quiet on the Western Front) is fiction and personal testimony, and has influenced greatly the image of World War I in film and popular imagination in Europe and abroad. The other novel examined in comparison comes from across "No Man’s Land"; it is the novel Death of a Hero by an English poet and writer, Richard Aldington. To these two voices I would like to add another one, not from the Western front, but from the Balkan front, one that engages with the same problems using similar narrative techniques; that is Stratis Myrivilis’ novel Life in the Tomb.
Comments
Paper delivered at the 1st Annual James A. Rawley Graduate Conference in the Humanities, Lincoln, NE. April 8, 2006. Copyright © 2006 Zacharoula Christoupolou.