Abstract
This chapter examines the reporters’ responses to the war once the conflict ended. It questions to what extent the third stage of the rite of passage—incorporation —affected the authors’ view of the war after the Armistice. Looking at the texts published by some of the authors discussed in the previous chapters, such as Edith Wharton, Phillip Gibbs, William Beach Thomas, or Will Irwin, I determine to what extent the passing of time and the overcoming of censorship modified the authors’ views and attitudes towards the trauma of the First World War. In the final part of the chapter, the main contributions of the book are highlighted.
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Notes
- 1.
Disenchantment has often been associated with the writings of the 1920s and 1930s. However, as Andrew Frayn argues in Writing Disenchantment (2015), “it is a product of social conditions which were already ingrained” in pre-war years (p. 7). According to Frayn, the idea of disenchantment is deeply rooted in the “context of a literature of decline, decay and degeneration” which had started in the late nineteenth century, influenced by social and technological developments (pp. 13–14).
- 2.
It is not a coincidence that Philip Gibbs used this specific expression as the title of his first post-war book.
- 3.
According to Arnold Van Gennep, rites of incorporation can include, among many others, an individual’s incorporation into an unknown group, an individual’s marriage, an individual’s incorporation into a family, the return of a traveller and his/her reincorporation into the original group, or the arrival of a traveller into a new tribe (see van Gennep 1909/2004 for further discussion on rites of incorporation).
- 4.
Most of the authors discussed throughout this book emerged triumphally from the war experience, as many of them achieved a celebrity status. Arnold Bennett “entered the war essentially a private citizen and emerged from it a public figure” (Roby 1972, p. 27). Basil Clarke, Harry Perry Robinson, Philip Gibbs, and William Beach Thomas were knighted for their role in the promotion of the war cause—although their work would be forever associated with the propaganda campaign that took place during the conflict; Mary Roberts Rinehart achieved the status of national celebrity after her 1915 war reports and ended the war “with the full officialdom of Washington behind her” (Cohn 1980, p. 127); Floyd Gibbons became a war hero and continued with a successful career as war reporter, and Edith Wharton and May Sinclair wrote their finest pieces of literature after the war. Among the “literary casualties” stand the members of the “old guard” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling who, as I explained in Chap. 3, did not adapt to the world that emerged after the conflict and continued to belong to an old tradition of war writing.
- 5.
Authors such as John Buchan or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had tried to historicise the war since very early in the conflict. Buchan started working on his serialised Nelson’s History of the War in 1915, later published in 1922 as A History of the Great War. Conan Doyle’s The British Campaign in France and Flanders was published in six volumes from 1914–1918, and later on published in full in 1919.
- 6.
See Chap. 2 for further discussion on this topic.
- 7.
- 8.
This incident is also included in Wharton’s Fighting France but Paul Boncour’s name is not revealed in the text.
- 9.
See Chap. 3 for further discussion on Wharton’s presence in the war zone.
- 10.
See Chap. 4 for further discussion on the in-between position of officially accredited war correspondents.
- 11.
Gómez Reus and Lauber use this expression to refer to the difficult literary nature of Wharton’s Fighting France.
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Prieto, S. (2018). Incorporation: Post-war and Disenchantment. In: Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68594-6_6
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