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The Fantastic And The First World War, Brian Kenna
The Fantastic And The First World War, Brian Kenna
Dissertations (1934 -)
This study argues that the First World War was a key event in the formation of the modern fantasy genre. It asserts that academic literary criticism formed around a set of assumptions that left it ill-equipped to conceptualize the fantastic as a modern mode of writing. By studying veteran English authors of World War I, including Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones, and J. R. R. Tolkien, it identifies the fantastic as an essential means of representing and responding to a set of events that were experienced as incomprehensible, even impossible. Because it offered a safe means of engaging the events of …