Popular War Themes in the Pre WWI Literature - Dissertation Example

Throughout history, war has always played the role of a major determining factor in shaping a country’s socio-economic, cultural, and religious aspects. War, right from the start of human civilization, received societal approval, until the end of the 19th century. Therefore, it is of little wonder that war has been a persistent theme in art and literature, throughout the various ages. War literature always mirrored the hopes and aspirations of men on the battlefield, and also that of the society back home.

There was a conscious feeling of patriotism, which intermingled with a pervading sense of futility about the lives lost in the various wars. The literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also shows a certain air of romanticism attached to the notions of war and the heroic actions of the brave soldiers at the front. However, all these started changing with the beginning of the twentieth century, when war slowly became a more grim matter, an issue of death, dying, and endless suffering, with a complete lack of the Victorian glorification of the war.

We notice this slow transformation during WWI when the era of modernism with its themes of individualism, a deep mistrust towards all state and religious institutions, and a general air of breaking away from social and conventional norms, entered the literary world. The basic principles of modernism can be summarised as related to concerns centered upon “the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life" (Simmel, 2004, 79).

The Vietnam War was however like a huge jolt, which shook the entire social world out of its repose, while also transforming the genre of war literature, making it more realistic, and reflecting the large-scale destruction that war actually spelled out.