Document Type
Review
Publication Date
4-2019
Department 1
Interdisciplinary Studies
Abstract
The Great War had a lasting influence on literature and literary culture in Britain. Spanning the ‘brows’ of literary taste were authors writing in response to the cataclysmic violence experienced by the war generation, at both the war front and the home front. The war's shadow permeated all aspects of cultural expression; its experience found authors who, with varying degrees of success, wrote on its lasting influence to a readership that, as the decades wore on, grew increasingly afraid of another world war. One of the responses undoubtedly influenced by the war was the genre of fantasy. As one of the contributors to this volume, John Garrad, reminds us, both high modernism and epic fantasy ‘are cast from the same source’, each a response to the lingering shock of war (277). The fantastic was one of the many British cultural biproducts of the horrific violence experienced and perpetrated in France and Flanders. [excerpt]
Copyright Note
This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
DOI
10.3366/ink.2019.0031
Version
Post-Print
Recommended Citation
Isherwood, Ian. Review of Baptism of Fire: The Birth of the Modern British Fantastic in World War I by Janet Brennan Croft (ed.). Journal of Inkling Studies 9, no. 1 (2019): 77-80.
Required Publisher's Statement
This article was originally published on the publisher's website.
Included in
English Language and Literature Commons, European History Commons, Military History Commons