Abstract
This article explores three novels by British contemporary novelist Adam Thorpe, which it situates in the context of a renaissance of rewriting and re-remembering the First World War in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The article discusses three novels: Thorpe’s debut novel Ulverton (1992), which includes a chapter about the experience of the First World War; Nineteen Twenty-One (2001), a full-length treatment of the immediate aftermath of the war; and Hodd (2009), in which the war enters by way of fictional footnotes to a fictional translation of a medieval Latin manuscript. It suggest that Thorpe’s writing about the First World War consciously acknowledges and interrogates the simultaneous impossibility and compulsion to write about war. Thorpe’s work offers a complex exploration of literature’s contribution to memory building processes, acknowledging both the limitations of fictional representations of war and the enduring power of fiction to re-imagine the war for successive new generations of readers.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 419-431 |
Journal | Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction |
Volume | 59 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 14 Dec 2017 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Keywords
- First World War
- World War 1
- memory
- narrative
- historical fiction