Shell Shock and the Legacy of the Victorian Past in the Present: Remembering WWI in Pat Barker’s <i>Another World</i>

Abstract

In her 1998 novel Another World, Pat Barker draws from a topic on which she has written previously with great success—the First World War and the experiences of its combatants—and yet approaches that topic from a completely different perspective. The novel returns to the Great War to consider notions of ‘shell shock’, attitudes towards WWI veterans, and the problems surrounding remembering past violence, but what is perhaps surprising about Another World is that it uses a Victorian storyline to address these concerns, and presents the First World War through the means of references to nineteenth-century culture.

Keywords

• wwi
• contemporary historical fiction
• shell shock
• pat barker
• <i>another world</i>
• 19thc cultural discourses