Remembering War, Resisting Myth

Veteran Autobiographies and the Great War in the Twenty-first Century

Bibliographic Data

ID12914914
AuthorsVincent Trott (0000-0001-7413-304X, The Open University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume6
Issue4
Pages328-342
Publication date2013-10-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of War and Culture Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1752-6272 • E-ISSN: 1752-6280
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1179/1752628013y.0000000003
OpenAlexW2074946129
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited12

This article examines the reconstruction of the First World War in the autobiographies of Harry Patch and Henry Allingham. As two of the last surviving veterans in Britain, these men assumed a powerful symbolic role, and, with the help of collaborators, both committed their memories to paper shortly before their deaths in 2009. By this stage many scholars agreed that the First World War had been reduced to a set of popular myths which conditioned cultural representations of the conflict, and this remains a pressing concern for many historians as the centenary of the war approaches. With this in mind, this article assesses the extent to which Patch's and Allingham's accounts reinforce or resist mythic narratives of the war, and by exploring the critical and popular reception of their works, it interrogates the notion of a hegemonic and homogenous mythology of the conflict

Ancient history · Art · First world war · Hegemony · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · World War II · Classics · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Military, Security, and Education Studies · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact

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