The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870-1914, and: Mark of the Beast: Death and Degradation in the Literature of the Great War (review)
During the past fifteen years, important studies of Great War writing have appeared, including Paul Fussell's Great War and Modern Memory (1977) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's No Man's Land, Volume 1: The War of the Words (1988). Jane Marcus continues to provoke debate with revisionist essays on overlooked women's war narratives, some of which have recently appeared, with afterwords by Marcus, in editions from The Feminist Press. In The Road to Armageddon, Cecil Eby returns to the forty-year period before the Great War to examine the roots of "the martial spirit" in English popular literature from 1870 to 1914. The authors Eby selects for discussion include the famous: H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie, G. A. Henty, Robert Baden-Powell, Thomas Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle, Henry Newbolt, and Rupert Brooke. Also treated are some lesser-known but influential writers of invasion stories and patriotic poetry, William Le Queux and G. E. Hornung. Eby's book documents the late Victorian and Edwardian hunger for invasion stories, public-school novels, and adventure and detective storiesÂ— narratives mat challenged long-held notions of British moral and military superiority and aroused British distrust of all nonislanders.