Paul Fussell – författare

A book about the meaning of travel, about how important the topic has been for writers for two and a half centuries, and about how excellent the literature of travel happened to be in England and America in the 1920s and 30s.

The Second World War has been romanticized almost beyond recognition by 'the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty.' In this readable and penetrating study, Paul Fussell goes behind the familiar diplomacy and heroics of history to examine the blunders, petty tyrannies, inconveniences, and deprivations that are many British and American people's memory of the War. There are lively sections on the role of drinking, tobacco, and sex in the war and on the home front; on propaganda; about writers and magazines who recorded the war or who attempted to keep aloft literary standards in a difficult time; on wartime slang and graphic recollections of the nightmare of combat. Written with a keen intelligence and deep emotion, Wartime is a worthy companion to Fussell's The Great War And Modern Memory , which won an American National Book Award and the National Critics Circle prize.

The year 2000 marks the 25th anniversary of one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Fussell illuminates a war that changed a generation and revolutionised the way we see the world. He explores the British experience on the western Front from 1914 to 1918, focusing on the various literary means by which it has been remembered, conventionalized and mythologized. It is also about the literary dimensions of the experience itself. Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for writers who have most effectively memorialized the Great War as an historical experience with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning. These writers include the classic memoirists Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden, and poets David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen. In his new introduction Fussell discusses the critical responses to his work, the authors and works that inspired his own writing, and the elements which influence our understanding and memory of war. Fussell also shares the stirring experience of his research at the Imperial War Museum's Department of Documents. Fussell includes a new Suggested Further Reading List.

Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. This brilliant work illuminates the trauma and tragedy of modern warfare in fresh, revelatory ways. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who--with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning--most effectively memorialized World War I as an historical experience. Dispensing with literary theory and elevated rhetoric, Fussell grounds literary texts in the mud and trenches of World War I and shows how these poems, diaries, novels, and letters reflected the massive changes--in every area, including language itself--brought about by the cataclysm of the Great War. For generations of readers, this work has represented and embodied a model of accessible scholarship, huge ambition, hard-minded research, and haunting detail.Restored and updated, this new edition includes an introduction by historian Jay Winter that takes into account the legacy and literary career of Paul Fussell, who died in May 2012.

Not everyone is as innocent as this engaging complainant. Most people who read know something about Johnson, enough at least to summon up images of him asseverating “No, Sir,” knocking back endless cups of tea, rambling over the Hebrides, puffing out his breath like a whale, repressing Boswell, standing bareheaded in Uttoxeter Market, and having a frisk with Beauclerk and Langton. And now, thanks to the Johnsonians of Yale, Columbia, Oxford, and Lichfield, our knowledge of the man and his social environment has increased more than anyone fifty years ago could have imagined. But despite prodigies of research and documentation, an interest in Johnson that could be called literary has been wanting. One suspects that for every hundred persons familiar with the classic Johnson anecdotes there is perhaps only one who has actually read the Rambler or the Idler or even the Lives of the Poets. And if the writings are still little read for their own sake, they are almost as little written about as attractive objects of criticism. Yale’s new edition of the writings, the first since the early nineteenth century, is an occasion to perceive that for all his value as conversational goad and wit and for all his attractiveness as a moral and religious hero, Johnson’s identity remains stubbornly that of a writer.

This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.