Overview

Looking at texts written throughout the careers of Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte, Mary Borden, Thomas Boyd, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Laurence Stallings, and Ernest Hemingway, American Writers and World War I argues that authors' war writing continuously evolved in response to developments in their professional and personal lives. Recent research has focused on constituencies of identity--such as gender, race, and politics--registered in American Great War writing. Rather than being dominated by their perceived membership of such socio-political categories, this study argues that writers reacted to and represented the war in complex ways which were frequently linked to the exigencies of maintaining a career as a professional author. War writing was implicated in, and influenced by, wider cultural forces such as governmental censorship, the publishing business, advertising, and the Hollywood film industry.American Writers and World War I argues that even authors' hallmark 'anti-war' works are in fact characterized by an awareness of the war's nuanced effects on society and individuals. By tracking authors' war writing throughout their entire careers--in well-known texts, autobiography, correspondence, and neglected works--this study contends that writers' reactions were multifaceted, and subject to change--in response to their developments as writers and individuals. This work also uncovers the hitherto unexplored importance of American cultural and literary precedents which offered writers means of assessing the war. Ultimately, the volume argues, American World War I writing was highly personal, complex, and idiosyncratic.

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9780198858812

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Highly Recommended. * K.B. Hannel, Saint Leo University, CHOICE *

We must thank David A. Rennie for this thoroughly researched work, which keeps eliciting the reader's curiosity chapter after chapter and no doubt constitutes a valuable contribution to the vast literature on American writers' narratives of the Great War. Meticulously detailed, Rennie's book is always very clearly referenced and provides systematic evidence to back up its author's claims. * Lucie Jammes, CERCLES * Highly Recommended. * K.B. Hannel, Saint Leo University, CHOICE *

Author Information

David Rennie is the editor of Scottish Literature and World War I (Edinburgh University Press), and the author of essays in The Cambridge History of American Literature and Culture and the Great War, The Hemingway Review, and The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. He is an Honorary Research Associate at Aberdeen University.

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