Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gérardin, Isabelle

Titel

Two Contemporary Representations of the Great War between Emotionand Irreverence: William Boyd’s and Pat Barker’s Regeneration

Ist Teil von

• Études britanniques contemporaines, 2011-12, Vol.41 (41), p.105-118

Ort / Verlag

Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article focuses on two contemporary novels that aim at reworking the traumatic past of the First World War: William Boyd’s The New Confessions (1987) and Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991). We will examine how those two novels, although in very different ways, do manage to treat the experience and the impact of combat through a constant tension between emotion and irreverence, seriousness and irony, thus seeking to convey the atrocities of war while rejecting the very possibility of pathos. Those two historiographic metafictions, because they testify to a certain postmodern distrust of history as something wholly coherent, seem to ‘abuse’ the past of the Great War the better to ‘use’ it and to explore the legacy of its wounds.