The embattled self : French soldiers' testimony of the Great War
Leonard V. Smith (Author)
How did the soldiers in the trenches of the Great War understand and explain battlefield experience, and themselves through that experience? Situated at the intersection of military history and cultural history, The embattled self draws on the testimony of French combatants to explore how combatants came to terms with the war. In order to do so, they used a variety of narrative tools at hand-- rites of passage, mastery, a character of the soldier as a consenting citizen of the Republic. None of the resulting versions of the story provided a completely consistent narrative, and all raised more questions about the "truth" of experience than they answered. In thematic chapters, Smith explains why the novel structured by a specific notion of trauma prevailed by the 1930s and undermines the conventional understanding of the war as tragedy and its soldiers as victims, a view that has dominated both scholarly and popular opinion since the interwar period
Personal narratives French
1 online resource (229 pages)
9780801471216, 9780801471209, 9781322523033, 0801471214, 0801471206, 1322523037
889302457
Rites of passage and the initiation to combat
The mastery of survival : death, mutilation, and killing
The genre of consent
The novel and the search for closure
English
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