War in Literature
AS/A Unit WW1, AQA B Modern novel
Your tour will focus on the core prose and drama texts you have chosen for course work and your preferred poetry text for the written examination. Around this core, and after discussion with your literature guide, we will build a stimulating mix of wider references.
Historic/ military context, diary entries, letters and extracts from other poems, autobiographies and novels will fascinate and challenge your students. We envisage that certain overarching themes will underpin our tours. We outline these in order to give you a fl avour of our approach.
“Come along lads!”
What brought one million men to enlist in the early months of the First World War? We examine the role of persuasive language and early war literature in achieving this unique phenomenon.
“All a poet can do is warn; that is why a true poet must be truthful.”
Poetry was reinvented through the experience of trench warfare. From Georgian pastoral to the brutal realism of the post Somme world, students will appreciate the characteristic differences between the poetry of expectation and that written from personal experience.
“Swear by the slain of the war that you’ll never forget.”
From the 1920s to the present day we consider a range of attitudes to remembrance and consider how the different nations chose to commemorate their war dead.
“I must go over the ground again”
We will examine the continuing fascination with this unique period of history which still attracts millions of readers and countless thousands of visitors to the battlefi elds of Belgium and France. From Sassoon to Blunden, Faulks to Ben Elton, students will look at the legacy in the light of their own battlefi eld visit.
