I really enjoyed reading Claire Buck’s “British Women’s Writing of the Great War.” Buck lends greater perspective to the variety of forces at work in literature during and after the war and the ways that writing evolved in the wake of apocalypse. The rising focus on experience as its own legitimate source  (88) is particularly interesting to me inasmuch as it relates to the ongoing dialogue that takes place in literary developments in this period. Just as optimism and disillusionment continued to coincide throughout the war (88), so did people continue to respond to each other’s work in terms of both style and content. If there are only so many ways to tell a story, there are only so many ways to innovate it; in this respect, Buck’s discussion of wartime poetry’s common perception as “disappointedly backward-looking” (89) bears an interesting contrast to more modernist prose developments in prose (103-106).

As writers endeavored to find new ways to experiment with representations of their own experience, they still often blended traditional poetic techniques or, in the case of modernism, adapted old traditions to construct their own (Pound’s development during and after the war is striking in this sense). In either case, a sense of literary conversation emerges. Just as “women wrote both autobiography and fictionalized war memoir, using the authority of personal experience to present the bleak horror of the Great War” (105) in response to the rising number of male narratives, other authors still managed to build on the work that already existed to paradoxically make their own experience more legitimate. I guess my point is that I’m really interested in the ways that authors grew increasingly individualistic in terms of representing the terror of war from their own perspective while still continuing to build an “increasingly uniform story” (105) of the individual experience. This relationship between the personal and the universal seems to shed a different light on the common perceptions of a Lost Generation (note we still think of it in terms of a Generation) completely isolated and unable to relate to an objective reality anymore, but reflects the more realistic perspective of someone like Brittain who conveys the sense of loss while still acknowledging the power of shared experience--particularly when it centers on a cataclysmic event. In that respect, maybe not much ever really changes in literature, no matter the time or occasion. When the power of an objective narrative is lost, all you have left is the one you make with other people.