The Short Story and the Great War

d’Annunzio, Gabriele (1863–1938)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/0123456789-rem1848-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Mara Santi

Keyword(s):

Short Story ◽

Political Engagement ◽

Active Role ◽

Great War ◽

Gabriele D'annunzio ◽

Italian Author ◽

Italian Politics ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Story Writer ◽

The Great War

Gabriele d’Annunzio, Italian poet, novelist, short story writer, dramatist, journalist, essayist, and scriptwriter, was a leading Italian author in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since 1914, he also played an active role in Italian politics and became a national war hero and ideologist of the nationalists. His nonconformist model of aesthetic life (life as a work of art), his successful literary career, his political engagement in the Great War, and even his scandalous affairs surrounded his life with a legendary aura and contributed to making him one of the most striking personalities of the period in Italy, where he was and still is called, by antonomasia, the ‘Vate’ (the Bard).

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Coda

The Culture of War ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781789621921.003.0010 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 207-216

Author(s):

Colin Foss

Keyword(s):

Short Story ◽

State Violence ◽

Guy De Maupassant ◽

Great War ◽

The Great War ◽

Auxiliary Role

The memory of the Siege of Paris has always been bound up with the memory of the Commune, the short-lived revolutionary moment that ended in May 1871, four months after the end of the Siege. This coda offers a reading of a short story, “Deux amis,” written and published by Guy de Maupassant in 1883, to suggest that, while those Parisians who lived through the Siege were convinced of its historical exemplarity, memory has relegated the Siege to an auxiliary role in history: prelude to the Commune, precursor to the Great War. Reading the Siege from its own perspective, as The Culture of War proposes to do, shows how literature became a vehicle for expressing the absurdity of war and the threat of state violence against its own citizens.

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War Thoughts from the Periphery: Contemporary Perspectives

Oceánide ◽

10.37668/oceanide.v13i.35 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 ◽

pp. 22-28

Author(s):

Laura Lojo Rodríguez

Keyword(s):

British Empire ◽

Short Story ◽

Public History ◽

Great War ◽

World War ◽

The First World War ◽

The Family ◽

Private And Public ◽

The Great War ◽

First World

This article aims at critically examining the contemporary urge to overcome taboos, silence and amnesia both in private and public history as a result of participation in the “Great War” in order to exorcise the transgenerational phantom which continues to haunt the present. To do so, I here examine two contemporary short stories published in the wake of centennial commemorations of the Great War in 2014, Sheena Wilkinson’s “Each Slow Dusk” and Xiaolu Guo’s “Coolies”. These stories articulate from different angles and perspectives women’s necessity to settle accounts with their own family history and with a traumatic inheritance which has been silenced. Unlike many war veterans whose participation in the war was acknowledged by proper mourning and public rituals, the protagonists of Guo and Wilkinson’s stories were deprived of recognition and their participation was silenced within the family and by official amnesia. The political position of Northern Ireland as part of the British Empire is overtly explored in Wilkinson’s depiction of the country’s adherence to the First World War in her short story “Each Slow Dusk”, where the protagonist sees her dreams of entering Queen’s College in Belfast abruptly put to an end when her shell-socked brother returns from the Somme in 1916. In “Coolies”, British-Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo brings to the fore the participation of 100,000 Chinese peasants– or kulis – recruited by the British army to dig European trenches, addressing a topic which already challenges received conceptions of the conflict as a European drama.

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