The Fictional First World War: Imagination and Memory Since 1914

The Fictional First World War: Imagination and Memory Since 1914

The Fictional First World War: Imagination and Memory Since 1914

An International Conference at the Centre for the Novel

Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, 6-9 April 2017

Programme

Soldiers of the First World War reading in the trenches. Image courtesy of Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries

Image courtesy of Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries

 

Plenary Speakers:

  • Oliver Kohns, University of Luxembourg
  • Randall Stevenson, University of Edinburgh
  • Steven Trout, University of South Alabama

The First World War was a very real event. However, since August 1914, authors have been writing their own versions of it. During the war, novels and short stories shaped public opinion about the conflict. After its close, fiction became a powerful means of recalling and re-examining events.   The war was ‘fictional’ in other ways too. Many supposedly truthful accounts of the war, whether in newspaper reports or in personal memoirs, were not quite as factual as they appeared to be. Wartime writing in combatant nations was heavily censored; post-war writing was often flawed by the passing of time and the experience of trauma. So, while the war of 1914-18 is often recalled through poetry, the fictions of the war offer fascinating perspectives, and raise powerful questions about how real experience and creative art interact.

This international conference, hosted by the Centre for the Novel will prompt an intercultural dialogue about the aesthetic and intellectual legacy of the war across many different nations. With plenary speakers exploring British, German and American material, this event explores how war narratives are able to disrupt critical categories and to defy national boundaries—but also to entrench them. It explores how factual writing about the war, including Government sponsored ‘propaganda’ materials, adopted the techniques of fiction to energize the emotional case for conflict. It also looks at how fiction interacts with other genres and media to explore the reality of war. Timed to coincide with the centenary of the US entry to the First World War on 6 April 1917, this event will also ask what difference it can make to think about the war beyond national contexts.

Panels might include: Autobiographies of War;  Writing and Nationalism; Trench Narratives; Nursing Narratives; Home Front Fiction; Transnational Fiction of the First World War; Memoirs and Fiction; Post-war novels and stories; War Fiction and Theatre; Music and War Fiction; Reception of War Fiction; Authenticity; Publishing Practices; What is Propaganda?; War Crime Writing; Children’s War Literature; WWI in Contemporary Fiction; WWI and the Critics; Warscapes; War Fiction and Poetry; Coming Home; Letters and Diaries.

English will be the main operating language of the conference, but panels and papers in other languages may be arranged.

Proposals for panels and individual papers are invited by October 31st. Please send to the Conference Chair: Dr Hazel Hutchison, University of Aberdeen: h.hutchison@abdn.ac.uk   More information at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sll/research/centre-for-the-novel-215.php

Confirmed participants: William Blazek (Liverpool Hope), Alison Fell (Leeds), Christine Hallett (Manchester), Margaret Higonnet (Connecticut), Karsten Piep (Union Institute and University) Mhairi Pooler (Aberdeen), Jane Potter (Oxford Brookes), Angela K. Smith (Plymouth), Samantha Walton (Bath Spa University).