How did the soldiers in the trenches of the Great War understand
and explain battlefield experience, and themselves through that
experience? Situated at the intersection of military history and
cultural history, The Embattled Self draws on the testimony of
French combatants to explore how combatants came to terms with the
war. In order to do so, they used a variety of narrative tools at
hand rites of passage, mastery, a character of the soldier as a
consenting citizen of the Republic. None of the resulting versions
of the story provided a completely consistent narrative, and all
raised more questions about the "truth" of experience than they
answered. Eventually, a story revolving around tragedy and the
soldier as victim came to dominate even to silence other types of
accounts. In thematic chapters, Leonard V. Smith explains why the
novel structured by a specific notion of trauma prevailed by the
1930s.
Smith canvasses the vast literature of nonfictional and
fictional testimony from French soldiers to understand how and why
the "embattled self" changed over time. In the process, he
undermines the conventional understanding of the war as tragedy and
its soldiers as victims, a view that has dominated both scholarly
and popular opinion since the interwar period. The book is
important reading not only for traditional historians of warfare
but also for scholars in a variety of fields who think critically
about trauma and the use of personal testimony in literary and
historical studies."
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