{"id":59,"date":"2008-11-14T11:02:37","date_gmt":"2008-11-14T10:02:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=59"},"modified":"2010-04-09T11:56:33","modified_gmt":"2010-04-09T10:56:33","slug":"remembering-the-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=59","title":{"rendered":"Remembering the War"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>\"\"Armistice Day this year has seen a particularly rich harvest of material for those interested in the literature of the First World War, coming as it does 90 years after the last shots were fired. <\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/em>‘s excellent series of booklets, with a wallchart on propaganda, provided a very accessible overview with plenty of examples from poetry, reminiscences and art as well as the historical background. The complete series, or missing booklets, can now be ordered here<\/a>. Much of the material in the booklets can also be found online, here<\/a> along with other material on the war. The Guardian<\/em> also carried a moving interview with Harry Patch<\/a>, the last surviving British soldier who fought in the trenches, by Andrew Motion, and a short video on the Battle of the Somme<\/a>. Oxford University has also just launched a much enhanced version of its excellent First World War Poetry Digital Archive<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"All<\/a>\"\"At our consortium meeting yesterday, Nadine was an enthusiastic advocate of All Quiet on the Home Front<\/a>\"\", ‘An Oral History of Life in Britain During the First World War’, by Steve Humphries and Richard van Emden, which she praised for the valuable first-hand accounts to balance the poetry from the front line. Someone reminded us of the value of the approach in Oh! What a Lovely War<\/a> – script from 1967 and film version<\/a>\"\" in 1969 (remembering the context in which it was produced). And I didn’t even have time to mention, or play extracts from, The Pity of War<\/a>\"\": a collection of elegiac First World War works by Elgar, Janacek, Debussy with a second disc of Wilfred Owen letters and poems read by Samuel West, interspersed with wartime songs. For literature teachers, the second disk alone is worth the price. <\/p>\n

Finally, for a broader overview, I can commend James Anderson Winn’s The Poetry of War<\/a>\"\", a wide-ranging study of war poetry from Homer to Bruce Springsteen. My review in NATE’s English Drama Media<\/em> can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A rich harvest of material for those interested in the literature of the First World War<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,5],"tags":[47],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-first-world-war","category-poetry","tag-owen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions\/188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}