Women, men and the Great War: An anthology of story / Edition 1

by Trudi Tate

Overview

"A wide ranging, challenging and constantly surprising collection ... focusing on the divisions the war created between men and women."
Pat Barker

This is an anthology of short stories of World War I from 25 classic writers.

Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield are among the women writers whose works account for half the volume. The stories are by turn poignant, violent, harsh, tender and desolating.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900719045980
Publication date:	11/16/1995
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Trudi Tate is a Fellow of Clare Hall and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

Editorial Reviews

Written by authors as famous as Woolf, Faulkner, Conrad and Wharton, and by equally talented lesser-knowns, these fascinating short stories immerse the reader in the milieu of WW I. Combatants, civilians, women, men, pacifists and propagandists not only describe the bloodshed, strategizing and paranoia of battle but also illuminate the Great War's subtle and profound effects on culture. Several characters lapse into insanity when war makes reality insupportable. Richard Aldington's Lt. Hall desperately tries to fend off the maddening guilt that haunts him. A seemingly sane man in Wyndham Lewis's tale comes unhinged over a poodle. Others simply detach from the world: Mary Butts's injured soldier holds onto reality through clinging to dreams of gossamer fabric, "crepe de Chine, organdie, aerophane, georgette." For others, the war is a curious liberation, a moment of cathartic potential when misery overturns normalcy. In Sylvia Townsend Warner's brilliant story, a brother and sister (both emotional casualties) find unconventional refuge in each other. Wharton's hilarious tour de force depicts a poor American professor chancing into an unlikely romantic fantasy when a rich English woman mistakes him for a refugee and takes him to her manor. In Radclyffe Hall's story, a lesbian who has never fit in discovers a use for her great physical strength and bravery as a nurse on the front lines. Tate's clear and accessible introduction yields good scholarly insights without academic puffery. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Although dimly remembered now in the United States, World War I was the traumatically definitive event of this century for the British and for modern literature, which was enduringly reshaped in reaction to the horrors of the first industrial war. Tate (Univ. of Manchester) selects from a wide spectrum of short fiction written about and during the war, from work by pacifists (D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield), the apolitical (Virginia Woolf), and the jingoistic (J.M. Barrie and Rudyard Kipling). By reprinting war writing of authors virtually unknown except to scholars"Sapper" (H.C McNeile), Arthur Machen, Winifred Holtbyand by selecting rarely anthologized work from the recognized masters of the eraAldingdon, H.D., Hemingway, FaulknerTate has created a refreshingly unclichd collection and one that makes the entire gamut of World War I views accessible to a new generation of readers. Biographical notes are included. For all collections.Shelly Cox, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale

Library Journal