Myth and Mimesis in Literary Testimonies of the First World War: Letting Go of the ‘Realist’ vs ‘Modernist’ Divide

International audience ; My research over the past few years has been primarily concerned with literary testimonies in prose of the First World War. An aspect that I now wish to investigate further is that besides their significance as literary documents of the war, many of these texts refute the conventional academic narrative of the evolution of literature from the nineteenth to the twentieth century according to which the war was a catalyst for innovative writing and fostered modernist movements that went against the grain of nineteenth-century writing. I wish to challenge the notion that the First World War caused or at least contributed significantly to a systematic division between 'traditional' and 'modernist' writing styles, particularly in terms of representation.What I plan to explore in this talk—and at this point, this is still very much a work a progress—is the way in which these literary representations of war are not concerned with a so-called divide between ‘realist’ and ‘modernist’ techniques, and in effect, make that division moot. I believe this discussion may have wider consequences and prompt a reconsideration of the transition from nineteenth-century to twentieth-century literature from the angle of representation, more specifically of mimesis, i.e. the relationship between representation and reality (and beyond this, the connection between the witnesses’ experience and the reader).I will be examining Sassoon’s war diaries (1915-18), Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), which was mostly written from the Front. and, more briefly, May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915).