The Great War and Modern Memory
The Great War and Modern Memory is a 1975 literary critique by Paul Fussell about how English writers who fought in World War I responded to their experiences in the trenches. Fussell argues that the war shifted writers’ worldviews, moving them away from prewar ideas and toward harsher themes that stayed with them in essays, letters, novels, humor, and poetry. He draws on Northrop Frye’s ideas to show how the war created a shared atmosphere in their writing.
The book looks closely at four English front-line writers—Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon—and explains how their wartime experiences shaped their later work. Fussell also notes that World War I continued to influence later authors such as Norman Mailer and Thomas Pynchon.
The Great War and Modern Memory received strong praise from critics and won major awards, including the National Book Award for Arts and Letters (the last year in that category) and the first National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. It is ranked #75 on Modern Library’s list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century.
The book has also faced criticism. Twenty years after its publication, Jay Winter argued Fussell overlooked soldier-writers who found conventional motifs adequate for mourning. In 2005, Dan Todman labeled the work polemical, saying Fussell selected texts to fit his argument and ignored other responses. In 2014, Daniel Swift called it a superb study of war language and metaphor but criticized it as history.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 21:38 (CET).