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Humour in British First World War Literature

Taming the Great War

  • Book
  • © 2023

Overview

Authors:
  1. Emily Anderson

    1. Sheffield, UK

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  • Explores how humour was used in Great War literature to tame the experience of war
  • Presents a corpus of literary texts usually overlooked by scholars and not included in the canon of WWI literature
  • Examines the political and social significance of humorous depictions of the war

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
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  2. Introduction: ‘[A]s in most war fiction, humour predominates’

    • Emily Anderson
    Pages 1-20

  3. Humour and Britishness During the Great War: ‘If a man brings us a joke, we require to be satisfied of its durability’

    • Emily Anderson
    Pages 21-46

  4. The Domestication of Death: ‘There are lots of jokes’

    • Emily Anderson
    Pages 47-72

  5. Class and Social Structure: ‘It is not taken seriously’

    • Emily Anderson
    Pages 73-100

  6. War and the Depiction of Gender: ‘Let us hope for the best and assume that he is dead’

    • Emily Anderson
    Pages 101-129

  7. The War and the Domestic Sphere: ‘That perpetual sense of the ridiculous’

    • Emily Anderson
    Pages 131-158

  8. Parody and Pop Culture in Trench Newspapers: ‘Let’s whistle ragtime ditties while we’re bashing out Hun brains’

    • Emily Anderson
    Pages 159-196

  9. Short Fiction and Service-Author Heroes: ‘You can’t expect glory and accuracy for a half-penny’

    • Emily Anderson
    Pages 197-224

  10. Conclusions

    • Emily Anderson
    Pages 225-228

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 229-235
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Keywords

About this book

This book explores how humorous depictions of the Great War worked to familiarise, domesticate, and tame the conflict. While well-known examples of First World War literature often emphasize enormous emotional disruption and the war’s extremes, other writers used humour to encourage a gentle, mild amusement, drawing on familiar, popular genres and forms used before 1914. In humorous portrayals of the war, tameness outdoes the unmanageable and the temperate exceeds the extraordinary. Humour in British First World War Literature is based on little-known primary material uncovered from detailed archival research, as well as works that, though written by celebrated authors, tend not to be placed in the canon of Great War literature. Each chapter examines key examples of literary texts, ranging from short stories and poetry to theatre and periodicals, in doing so investigating the complex representational, political, and social significance of the tame strand in humorous Great War literature.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Sheffield, UK

    Emily Anderson

About the author

Emily Anderson is a researcher, writer, and podcaster. Her research interests are in literary humour and unfinished projects. 

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Humour in British First World War Literature

  • Book Subtitle: Taming the Great War

  • Authors: Emily Anderson

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34051-2

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-34050-5Published: 12 September 2023

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-34053-6Due: 13 October 2023

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-34051-2Published: 11 September 2023

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: IX, 235

  • Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Literature, general, British Culture, Drama

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