Onset

On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. This event quickly led to the outbreak of the Great War a month later. On 28 June 2014 I will begin my reading project in which I will get to read literature by authors from combatant countries that turned 18 during the war. I have included in my reading list fiction, children’s fiction and literary memoir.

By reading through the centenary years of the war and surveying the writings of the mini-generation born between July 1896 and November 1900, I intend to explore several interesting questions:

• How did the Great War impact the literature of this mini-generation? Was it more sombre, more cynical, less romantic?
• Did the Great War reduce the number of great writers in this mini-generation? Is it possible to identify gaps in the literary pantheon of countries such as England, France and Germany?
• Was the literature of the 1920s and 1930s written by this mini-generation largely preoccupied with the Great War and its outcome or was the conflict generally disregarded?
• Did writers who had been on active service write semi-autobiographically about the Great War in their fiction or did they distance themselves from the horrors they had experienced by writing about purely fictional characters?

 I will read through a reading list of writers born in 1896 (July-December), 1897, 1898, 1899 and 1900 (January-November). For each year, my reading list is arranged by order of year of publication of the chosen book by each author. The selections I have made have been largely in favour of books that give an account of the Great War or  its aftermath  or the years preceding it.

My first title is This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald.