Silvia Mergenthal: A Man Could Stand Up: Masculinities in British and Australian Literature of the Great War (Anglistische Forschungen, 472). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2022.

• Stefan Horlacher
• Thilini Meegaswatta

A Man Could Stand Up sets out to offer a re-reading of British and Australian literature of World War I (WWI), exploring whether the texts under analysis “offer variations on, or alternatives to [the soldier tale’s] narratives of disillusionment and retrenchment”. With 226 pages divided into twelve chapters and a bibliography – an index is missing – it is a rather compact book, given that it covers an admirably wide span of texts and time by offering analyses of twenty novels (seventeen British, three Australian), two dramas (one British, one Australian), and four non-fiction works of scholarship (three British, one Australian) spread across the periods 1915–32 and 1960–2007.