On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919â "1941

Trout, Steven

ISBN 10: 0817357238 / ISBN 13: 9780817357238

Published by University Alabama Press, 2012

About this Item

Very Good - Crisp, clean, unread book with some shelfwear/edgewear, may have a remainder mark - NICE PAPERBACK Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # M0817357238Z2

Bibliographic Details

• Title: On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919â "1941
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0817357238
• ISBN 13: 9780817357238
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

This work is a detailed study of how Americans in the 1920s and 1930s interpreted and remembered the First World War. Steven Trout asserts that from the beginning American memory of the war was fractured and unsettled, more a matter of competing sets of collective memories—each set with its own spokespeople— than a unified body of myth. The members of the American Legion remembered the war as a time of assimilation and national harmony. However, African Americans and radicalized whites recalled a very different war. And so did many of the nation’s writers, filmmakers, and painters.

Trout studies a wide range of cultural products for their implications concerning the legacy of the war: John Dos Passos’s novels Three Soldiers and 1919, Willa Cather’s One of Ours, William March’s Company K, and Laurence Stallings’s Plumes; paintings by Harvey Dunn, Horace Pippin, and John Steuart Curry; portrayals of the war in The American Legion Weekly and The American Legion Monthly; war memorials and public monuments like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; and commemorative products such as the twelve-inch tall Spirit of the American Doughboy statue.

Trout argues that American memory of World War I was not only confused and contradictory during the ‘20s and ‘30s, but confused and contradictory in ways that accommodated affirmative interpretations of modern warfare and military service. Somewhat in the face of conventional wisdom, Trout shows that World War I did not destroy the glamour of war for all, or even most, Americans and enhanced it for many.

About the Author

Steven Trout is a professor of English andcChair of the English Department at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. He is author/editor of several books, including Memorial Fictions:Willa Cather and the First World War and American Prose Writers of World War I: A Documentary Volume.