Writers’ Response to the Architectural Destructions of the Great War

Abstract

This article addresses the impact of the architectural destructions of the Great War on heritage culture, proposing a literary approach in connexion with research from other disciplines in the humanities. Many contemporary authors reacted to the bombardment of cities, villages, and monuments, either in the press, or in personal testimonials, or even in works of fiction. The corpus of study brings together all these types of writing produced by professional writers during and immediately after the War, in English and French. An initial set of statements helps us to understand how the war changed the relationship to heritage that then prevailed in Europe. The author examines the specific nature of writers’ responses, looking at the literary devices underlying argumentative strategies in order to express the collective sentiment of loss and mourning. Once placed at the heart of destruction, writers who served in the War used ruins both as a symbol of universal chaos and as a paradigm of modern poetics.

KEYWORDS:

• Great War architectural destructions
• the cultural impact of war ruins
• the cult of monuments
• the heritage of humankind
• civilization vs. barbarity in propaganda
• war and culture interaction
• literary approach

Acknowledgement

Warm thanks to my friends Nathalie and Gérard Lesaffre for their generous assistance in writing this article.

ORCiD

Joëlle Prungnaud http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0936-2457

Notes on contributor

Joëlle Prungnaud is an author of a doctoral thesis (University of Paris-Sorbonne): Gothique et Décadence: Recherches sur la continuité d’un mythe et d’un genre au XIXe siècle en Grande-Bretagne et en France (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997) and of an Accreditation to direct research, dealing with the relationship between literature and architecture, Joëlle Prungnaud taught Comparative Literature at the University of Lille, as a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor from 1994 to 2002, then as a University Professor until 2012. Now Professor Emerita, she focuses her research works on the architectural destructions of the Great War in anglophone and francophone literature.