“’Tis Ninety Years Since”: The Great War in British and Canadian Novels

Abstract

Ever since Sir Walter Scott added the subtitle 'Tis Sixty Years Since to his novel Waverley in 1814, such a temporal positioning at the beginning of a fictional narrative has become the trademark of the historical novel. The Scottish Romantic writer is indeed seen as the father of this genre by scholars such as Georg Lukács (Lukács 1965: 39f.). If I have taken certain liberties with Scott’s formulation in my own title here, this is due to the incidental fact that the First World War, my main topic, ended over ninety years ago from our perspective of the early second decade of the 21^st century. From our contemporary position, even the time-span that has passed since the end of the Second World War would now correspond to the sixty-year distance that Scott had seen as the minimum required for enabling the literary treatment of a past event in a historical novel.