Early 20th century literature's response to World War One

Résumé ou Introduction

In many ways, literature goes together with the current political events. After and during World War One it had a profound effect on the society and literature. People were first fascinated by the war due to the massive propaganda published by the governments, but shocked and feared of the horror they experienced during war time. Literature had changed dramatically and drastically when it came to war responses. It was mostly because the scale of damage was mostly unforeseen before the Great War. That’s why literature was strong and self-conscious after this catastrophe in the early twentieth century. “The Great War was, in cultural terms, the last nineteenth-century war, in that it provoked an outpouring of literature touching on an ancient set of beliefs about revelation, divine justice, and the nature of catastrophe.” For most of the writers it was hard to express all their feelings and experiences in long texts and novels. That’s why famous writers such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce used the form of poems and poetry to express their feelings about what happened to them and the society in World War One. In the following essay, we’re taking a closer look at these three writers and how they reacted to the First World War with literature.