Sherston and Sassoon in France: Account of Events of the Great War
Siegfried Sassoon made records of the Great War at different spatial and temporal distances from the events and in different forms which indicate completely different ideological and material preoccupations. The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare accounts of two selected events of 1916...
| Published in: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2005-11-01
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| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/13760 |
| Summary: | Siegfried Sassoon made records of the Great War at different spatial and temporal distances from the events and in different forms which indicate completely different ideological and material preoccupations. The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare accounts of two selected events of 1916 presented in the Diaries and in his autobiographical fiction Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. Sassoon’s work, at first the expression of immediate individual memory, later becomes part of a consensual commemorative narrative. The urgent, immediate memory of a necessarily fragmented universe, put into writing to record the truth of the moment is transformed into a wider view of events in which individual memories cross-pollinate each other and merge into a sort of fictional war memorial. |
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| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |