Read for the War Challenge with a Twist 2014 at War Through the Generations
World War I and
The American Novel – Stanley Cooperman, 1970
The 20th century began in the US and Europe
with an optimistic view of material progress and peace. These bright hopes were
shattered by World War I. Death and injury and disfigurement, industrialized
warfare, the complicity of the clergy and bombastic jingoes, and the political
lying and betrayal of Wilson all contributed to the cyncial feeling that the
war was futile and the war aims hypocritical.
This aim of this book is to describe the war and the
subsequent disillusionment as they were perceived by American writers. This
book will call to mind Paul Fussell’s seminal The Great War and Modern Memory (1976), as it is largely literary
criticism and cultural history. Also like Fussell’s book, it is highly
readable, because it was written before the grating jargon of Theory became the
norm in English departments.
Cooperman discusses novelists of the 1920s such as
Hemingway, Faulkner, Cummings, Cather, and many others who have been forgotten.
His examination of Dos Passos’ Three
Soldiers is sympathetic, insightful, and critical. I think people who have
already read the major primary sources (One
of Ours, The Enormous Room, Soldier’s Pay, A Farewell to Arms) would get much out of this literate and
interesting examination of the impact of WWI on American life and thought.
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