The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #133984 Message #3595881
Posted By: Keith A of Hertford
27-Jan-14 - 10:58 AM
Thread Name: BS: Christmas Truce (1914)
Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Truce (1914)
You have not read those two books either Greg.
Reynolds supports my views.
The reviews clearly show that.
(Unless you can provide any quote from either book that says different Greg? Ha Ha!)
"An intelligent assessment of the impact of the first world war on Britain that challenges its iconic status as a world of gloomy trenches, anti-war poets and wasted lives."
" During this second phase, he argues, the great war assumed its iconic status as a world of gloomy trenches, antiwar poets and wasted lives, and has, on the whole, stayed that way up to the present. He fears that the commemorations next year will be filled with more Sassoon and Owen, and melancholy evocations of life on the western front."
"Reynolds understands that the idea of the great war as trenches and poems grew in significance from the 1960s, and was soon embedded in school curricula and media representations of the conflict (unlike in continental European countries, where the war receded in popular memory due to the horrors and conflicts provoked by world war two). He is surely right to argue that this has narrowed the popular perspective. "
"Reynolds goes further. He argues that we have "lost touch" with the Great War, in large measure because of a "peculiar British preoccupation" with the poetry rather than the history: "1914-18 has become a literary war, detached from its moorings in historical events". On this account, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon have a lot to answer for."