Virgine Renard: The Great War and Postmodern Memory. The First World War in Late 20 th-Century British Fiction (1985-2000) (Comparatism and Society, 27). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013.

• Tom Nolan

The main title of this book The Great War and Postmodern Memory suggests a broad survey – couched in the ‘postmodern’ terminology of university arts departments – of contemporary attitudes to the First World War. But that would be misleading on two counts. Firstly, although the author calls many of the ‘usual suspects’ – the ones who line up again and again on literature course reading-lists: Derrida, Ricœur etc. – to take the stand, their most egregious pronouncements are not quoted, and they are not allowed to dominate proceedings. That is, The Great War and Postmodern Memory does not, itself, exhibit the worst vices of postmodernism. And secondly, although the book devotes, in the spirit of Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, a good deal of space to Britain’s century-long cultural absorption of the First World War and its legacy, its real focus is much more narrow: the 1990s mini-boom in First World War literature, with a particular emphasis on Pat Barker’s ‘RegenerationTrilogy’. That mini-boom reflected and complemented a contemporary concern for memory and trauma in cultural studies departments, so that Renard feels justified in choosing ‘trauma theory’ as the ideal theoretical lens through which to examine, in particular, Barker’s novels.