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War Isn't the Only Hell - A New Reading of World War I American Literature (Hardcover)
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War Isn't the Only Hell - A New Reading of World War I American Literature (Hardcover)
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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.
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