The Great War and Modern Literature

World War I marks the beginning of the modern era but, like the death of Queen Victoria, the war is a marker more useful in historical than literary terms. For example, the literary movement now commonly referred to as «Modernism» was well underway by the last decade of the nineteenth century. In the minds of those British writers who survived the conflict, the World War was more than a military and political event that changed the map of Europe. Beginning with the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others, modern English literature took on pervasive tones of irony and intensity, and expressed moods of sobriety and pathos that writers believed were intrinsic to the human condition in the modern world. It would be incorrect to think of these qualities as uniquely modern, of course, but their increasing importance in literature suggests the movement away from the relatively self-confident view of the world that was characteristic of the nineteenth century.