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Download fileHerbert Read and the fluid memory of the First World War: poetry, prose and polemic
According to many critics, Herbert Read’s experience fighting in the trenches of the First
World War was a formative one that shaped his intellectual life. His war poetry and
autobiographical prose reflected on the horrors of fighting, and his anarchist-pacifism was a
product, they argue, of experiencing the war first hand. Utilizing archival material and analysing
Read’s poetry, prose and polemical writing, the present article contests this reading. It argues
that Read’s perception of the war was deeply ambiguous, and shifted in response to the
changing view of the conflict in British cultural history. He saw the war as at once disabling
and liberating, and his continual return to the conflict as a subject in his writing was a process
of attempting to fix its ultimate meaning to his life.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
Historical ResearchVolume
88Issue
240Pages
333 - 354Citation
ADAMS, M.S., 2015. Herbert Read and the fluid memory of the First World War: poetry, prose and polemic. Historical Research, 88 (240), pp. 333 - 354.Publisher
Wiley © Institute of Historical ResearchVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2015-05-01Publication date
2015Notes
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: ADAMS, M.S., 2015. Herbert Read and the fluid memory of the First World War: poetry, prose and polemic. Historical Research, 88 (240), pp. 333 - 354., which has been published in final form at http://dx/doi.org/10.1111/1468-2281.12075. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.ISSN
1468-2281Publisher version
Language
- en