AustLit
What’s Missing in This Picture? : The ‘Middle Parts of Fortune’ in Australian Great War Literature
single work
Issue Details:
First known date:
2010...
2010
What’s Missing in This Picture? : The ‘Middle Parts of Fortune’ in Australian Great War Literature
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'Disillusionment as a style of war fiction, with its characteristic debunking of old- fashioned glorious-war notions, owes its prominence more to the post-war, depression-oppressed mood of the 1930s than to the war's factual history. Soldier authors such as Sassoon, Graves and Aldington followed Remarque's popular All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) with their own reminiscences, part auto-biography, part imagination, and wholly literary. With an emphasis on the terrible conditions and the devastating experiences of sensitive individual protagonists, the disenchanted novels of the Great War canon expose war's futility and horror. The disenchantment perspective is generally summarised as the culpable sacrifice of idealistic young men by war-mongering politicians and profiteers. Its tropes are the Western Front trench, mud, shellshock, summary executions and the ruin of a generation. Although recent historical and literary analyses have demonstrated errors, exaggerations and misunderstandings in these clichés, popular memory still prefers disillusion. So indeed does current literary fiction set in the period.' (p. 2)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 6 Jan 2014 13:55:12
21-33
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-38438-20110201-1127-PhilamentIssue16-4.pdf
What’s Missing in This Picture? : The ‘Middle Parts of Fortune’ in Australian Great War Literature
Philament : Borders, Regions, Worlds
Subjects:
- Flesh in Armour : A Novel 1932 single work novel
- The Wells of Beersheba : A Light Horse Legend 1933 single work novella
- Crucible : An Australian First World War Novel 1935 single work novel
- Backs to the Wall 1937 single work autobiography
- The Desert Column : Leaves from the Diary of an Australian Trooper in Gallipoli, Sinai and Palestine 1932 single work autobiography diary correspondence
- A Fortunate Life 1980 single work autobiography
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