War Isn't the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature
288
War Isn't the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature
288eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A vigorous reappraisal of American literature inspired by the First World War.
American World War I literature has long been interpreted as an alienated outcry against modern warfare and government propaganda. This prevailing reading ignores the US army’s unprecedented attempt during World War I to assign men—except, notoriously, African Americans—to positions and ranks based on merit. And it misses the fact that the culture granted masculinity only to combatants, while the noncombatant majority of doughboys experienced a different alienation: that of shame.
Drawing on military archives, current research by social-military historians, and his own readings of thirteen major writers, Keith Gandal seeks to put American literature written after the Great War in its proper context—as a response to the shocks of war and meritocracy. The supposedly antiwar texts of noncombatant Lost Generation authors Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cummings, and Faulkner addressed—often in coded ways—the noncombatant failure to measure up.
Gandal also examines combat-soldier writers William March, Thomas Boyd, Laurence Stallings, and Hervey Allen. Their works are considered straight-forward antiwar narratives, but they are in addition shaped by experiences of meritocratic recognition, especially meaningful for socially disadvantaged men. Gandal furthermore contextualizes the sole World War I novel by an African American veteran, Victor Daly, revealing a complex experience of both army discrimination and empowerment among the French. Finally, Gandal explores three women writers—Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, and Ellen La Motte—who saw the war create frontline opportunities for women while allowing them to be arbiters of masculinity at home. Ultimately, War Isn’t the Only Hell shows how American World War I literature registered the profound ways in which new military practices and a foreign war unsettled traditional American hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender, and even race.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781421425115 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 417 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Keith Gandal is a professor of English at City College of New York. He is the author of The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I
1. Noncombatant Mobilization Wounds
2. The Horrors of War Mobilization
3. Saved by French Arrest and Imprisonment
4. Hemingway's Thrice-Told Tale
Part II
5. The Mobilization of Young Women
6. "A Miracle So Wide"
Part III
7. A War Hero in an Antiwar Tale?
8. The Intimate Seductions of Meritocracy
9. Not Only What You Would Expect
10. Too Glorifying to Tell
Conclusion
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
World War I transformed the United States, and along with it the lives of millions of American citizens. Challenging longstanding interpretations of the Lost Generation, Keith Gandal exposes us to a diverse array of writers—white and black, male and female, combatants and noncombatants—to demonstrate the full totality of the American war experience. Seamlessly merging close literary analysis with critical historical context, War Isn’t the Only Hell is a landmark study.
A sweeping reassessment of American First World War writing, War Isn’t the Only Hell is simply brilliant, as packed with original insights, masterful close readings, and successful challenges to critical orthodoxy as any book I’ve ever read.
Gandal brilliantly challenges old interpretations of post–World War I literature and presents a much more complex understanding of the experience of combatant versus noncombatant. Gandal’s excellent work includes a study of gender, race, and class, as well as issues of validation, alienation, disillusionment, maculation, and the US Army’s new meritocracy system represented in the works of 13 prominent authors.
Exceptionally well-written, War Isn’t the Only Hell combines razor-sharp historical and literary analysis to offer a startlingly original interpretation of Lost Generation literature. Keith Gandal recasts this extraordinary moment of literary creativity as a societal-wide mediation on the American way of war. In the process, he transforms World War I, a long-forgotten American war, into a major cultural touchstone.
A sweeping reassessment of American First World War writing, War Isn’t the Only Hell is simply brilliant, as packed with original insights, masterful close readings, and successful challenges to critical orthodoxy as any book I’ve ever read.—Steven Trout, University of South Alabama, author of On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941
The canon of World War I literature, along with scholarship on the Lost Generation and modern war literature more generally, will have to be rethought in light of Keith Gandal’s new study of what it means to go to war and to write passionately about it. Multiple ambiguities and new resonances in the meaning of service, combat, bravery, and trauma emerge in this exhilarating reinterpretation.—Eric J. Sundquist, Johns Hopkins University, author of Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America
Gandal brilliantly challenges old interpretations of post–World War I literature and presents a much more complex understanding of the experience of combatant versus noncombatant. Gandal’s excellent work includes a study of gender, race, and class, as well as issues of validation, alienation, disillusionment, maculation, and the US Army’s new meritocracy system represented in the works of 13 prominent authors.—Nancy Gentile Ford, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, author of Americans All: Foreign-Born Soldiers in World War I
War Isn't the Only Hell shows how the experience of enlistment and army life impacted the writing of familiar canonical authors, like Hemingway, but also writers whose work is less familiar, including Ellen La Motte and Victor Daly. Gandal provides readings of these texts that illuminate them individually and collectively and uses them to, in turn, shine a light on a crucial moment in American culture. After reading Gandal, you will want to go out and (re)read all the books he mentions.—Pearl James, University of Kentucky, author of The New Death: American Modernism and World War I
Exceptionally well-written, War Isn’t the Only Hell combines razor-sharp historical and literary analysis to offer a startlingly original interpretation of Lost Generation literature. Keith Gandal recasts this extraordinary moment of literary creativity as a societal-wide mediation on the American way of war. In the process, he transforms World War I, a long-forgotten American war, into a major cultural touchstone.—Jennifer D. Keene, Chapman University, author of Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America
World War I transformed the United States, and along with it the lives of millions of American citizens. Challenging longstanding interpretations of the Lost Generation, Keith Gandal exposes us to a diverse array of writers—white and black, male and female, combatants and noncombatants—to demonstrate the full totality of the American war experience. Seamlessly merging close literary analysis with critical historical context, War Isn’t the Only Hell is a landmark study.—Chad Williams, Brandeis University, author of Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era
The canon of World War I literature, along with scholarship on the Lost Generation and modern war literature more generally, will have to be rethought in light of Keith Gandal’s new study of what it means to go to war and to write passionately about it. Multiple ambiguities and new resonances in the meaning of service, combat, bravery, and trauma emerge in this exhilarating reinterpretation.
War Isn't the Only Hell shows how the experience of enlistment and army life impacted the writing of familiar canonical authors, like Hemingway, but also writers whose work is less familiar, including Ellen La Motte and Victor Daly. Gandal provides readings of these texts that illuminate them individually and collectively and uses them to, in turn, shine a light on a crucial moment in American culture. After reading Gandal, you will want to go out and (re)read all the books he mentions.