Description
This project interrogates the evolution of European identity in the twentieth century through a study of books written by French combatants of World War I. These accounts include novels, diaries, memoirs, and collections of letters. Through considering these texts and the cultural history that created them, it questions a "metanarrative" of the Great War as tragedy and the soldier who fought it as a victim. Part I is a "history of the book," exploring how the soldier-as-victim was established as the predominant version of the story through interconnected networks of writers, publishers, and readers of war books. Part II explores ways in which experience and identity in the Great War can be read differently, through a series of essays on various categories of identity--the now-familiar triad of gender, race, and class, as well as body, religion, and national and political identity.
