Description
Book SynopsisA vigorous reappraisal of American literature inspired by the First World War. American World War I literature has long been interpreted as an alienated outcry against modern warfare and government propaganda. This prevailing reading ignores the US army's unprecedented attempt during World War I to assign menexcept, notoriously, African Americansto positions and ranks based on merit. And it misses the fact that the culture granted masculinity only to combatants, while the noncombatant majority of doughboys experienced a different alienation: that of shame. Drawing on military archives, current research by social-military historians, and his own readings of thirteen major writers, Keith Gandal seeks to put American literature written after the Great War in its proper contextas a response to the shocks of war and meritocracy. The supposedly antiwar texts of noncombatant Lost Generation authors Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cummings, and Faulkner addressedoften in coded waysthe n
Trade ReviewGandal's study is enlightening and will be a valuable resource for studying the Great War.
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Choice[Gandal] shows how unsatisfactory wartime experiences informed the fiction of a range of writers, including William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom lied about their military roles in later years.
—Lawrence D. Freedman,
Foreign AffairsThe book is correct to claim that future scholars of Great War American literature will have to take these different military classifications into account. Combatants and noncombatants did experience service differently, just as soldiers who fought in the trenches experienced battle differently from those who did not. And just as importantly, Gandal's book should also be praised for bringing back into the light of day several excellent primary texts that have sadly sunk into obscurity.
—Aaron Shaheen, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga,
Studies in the NovelGandal's latest effort provide[s] needed extended analysis into a complicated war . . . Although Gandal offers insights into women writers of the period, as well as African American writers such as Victor Daly, it is the combatant/noncombatant paradox that drives the book, resulting in a much more complex reading and history of American Great War literature than in traditional analyses.
—Ross K. Tangedal, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point,
The F Scott Fitzgerald ReviewGandal suggests that the conventional binary classification of World War I literature as either pro- or antiwar has in fact distracted us from signal differences between combatant and noncombatant experiences of war. . . . Gandal persuasively reads
A Farewell to Arms, together with other major modernist works, as validating the particular resentments and disappointments of a vast audience of veterans who served in noncombatant roles rather than as speaking to the comparatively few American soldiers who actually served in combat during this conflict. The caste system elevating combat roles, on the one hand, over combat support and combat service support functions, on the other, persists today in the US military. . .
—Elizabeth D. Samet, United States Military Academy,
American Literary HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I
1. Noncombatant Mobilization Wounds
2. The Horrors of War Mobilization
3. Saved by French Arrest and Imprisonment
4. Hemingway's Thrice-Told Tale
Part II
5. The Mobilization of Young Women
6. "A Miracle So Wide"
Part III
7. A War Hero in an Antiwar Tale?
8. The Intimate Seductions of Meritocracy
9. Not Only What You Would Expect
10. Too Glorifying to Tell
Conclusion
Notes
Index
