Abstract
This chapter looks at previous research on the field of literature and journalism during the First World War and explains the need for this book as well as its structure. It explores why theories of liminality, as developed by Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, and Eric Leed, are a useful conceptual tool for looking at British and American literary journalism written from the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. Additionally, the chapter explains the main research questions that shape the volume, namely whether the authors' gender, nationality, and time of writing influenced their portrayal of the war.
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Notes
- 1.
From the war years, First from the Front (Harold Ashton 1914), With the Allies (Richard Harding Davis 1914), Fighting in Flanders (Alexander Powell 1914), The Soul of the War (Philip Gibbs 1915), Over There (Arnold Bennett 1915), France at War (Rudyard Kipling 1915), Kings, Queens and Pawns (Mary Roberts Rinehart 1915), A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (May Sinclair 1915), Fighting France (Edith Wharton 1915), A Visit to Three Fronts (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1916), With the British on the Somme (William Beach Thomas 1917), My Round of the War (Basil Clarke 1917), The Turning Point (Harry Perry Robinson 1917), The Glory of the Coming (Irvin S. Cobb 1918), “And They Thought We Wouldn’t Fight” (Floyd Gibbons 1918), A Reporter at Armageddon (Will Irwin 1918). Published after the war, Realities of War (Philip Gibbs 1920), The Next War (Will Irwin 1921), A Traveller in News (Beach Thomas 1925), and A Backward Glance (Edith Wharton 1934).
- 2.
Cases in point are Catherine Reilly’s Scars upon my Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War (1981), Trudi Tate’s Women, Men, and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories (1995), Agnes Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman, and Judith Hattaway’s Women’s Writings on the First World War (1999), or Margaret Higonnet’s Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I (1999) and Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War (2001), to name but a few.
- 3.
Claire Tylee’s The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–64 (1990) is a pioneer study and a landmark in the field. Other influential critical studies are Sharon Ouditt’s Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (1994), Jean Gallagher’s The World Wars through the Female Gaze (1998), Angela K. Smith’s The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (2000), or Alice Kelly’s recent critical edition of Edith Wharton’s Fighting France (2015).
- 4.
(Buitenhuis 1989; Farrar 1998; Haste 1977; Johnson 1962; Larson 1940; Marquis 1978; Messinger 1992; Peterson 1939; Ross 1996; Sanders and Taylor 1982; Squires 1935; Thomson 1999). General studies on war reporting such as Philip Knightley’s influential The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam, the War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (1975) or Mary Mander’s Pen and Sword: American War Correspondents, 1898–1975 (2010) also consider journalism during the First World War as an example of propaganda and concealment of truth (Connelly and Welch 2005; Emery et al. 1992; Hohenberg 1964; Simpson 2010).
- 5.
- 6.
The later works of Will Irwin and Irvin S. Cobb will be discussed in Chap. 5. However, the work of Major Granville Fortescue has also been left out of consideration in this book because his writings about the war were so varied and written from so many angles that he deserves a space of his own that lies outside the scope of this study.
- 7.
I have left out of consideration Frederick Palmer’s substantial work because he was left in charge of press accreditation during the war; in consequence, he offered a more obviously biased and propagandistic perspective of America’s role in the war than the rest of the correspondents under consideration.
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Prieto, S. (2018). Introduction: Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone. In: Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68594-6_1
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