World war 1 autobiography definitions

When the soldiers left the battlefields, they took the war with them in their heads and bodies. Modern readers seeking to understand the nuances and subtleties of the Great War are often directed toward published diaries, collections of letters, and autobiographies of the participants.

World war 1 autobiography definitions and examples

These provide a close glimpse of life from the perspective of one of the participants and can challenge or validate the accepted and official accounts - especially in the form of diaries and letters which provide an "at the moment of writing" viewpoint, unmediated by reflection or change in circumstance.

Indeed, when read in aggregate, they provide hints at the commonalities of experience across cultures and the unique perspectives that some experienced. On the other hand, autobiographies, often written years or decades after the times in question - and, on occasion, without the availability of primary source materials such as diaries or letters and instead relying solely on memory and recollection - are often more polished and literary but lack the immediacy of the diary or letter and are subject to the changes of memory and the at-times subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle effort to paint a more glorious or heroic role for the author.

Propaganda, whether written, photographic, or cinematic, was used broadly and easily altered the recollections of participants' autobiographies. Indeed the line between fictional and "true" accounts of the war blurred without clearly distinctive boundaries.

While many of these materials have been published in the last years, several of these texts are much more commonly read, often being assigned as readings for a course of study, and now they form a canon of literature about the conflict.

World war 1 autobiography definitions