At the centennial of the end of World War I, we seem well poised to rethink our understanding of the war that was supposed to end all wars. Indeed, Vincent Trott argues in Publishers, Readers, and the Great War: Literature and Memory since 1918 that the narrative of the Great War accepted by scholars across disciplines—though particularly by those, he notes, in literary studies—is more mythology than objective description. Historians, Trott tells us, bemoan how literary accounts of the war have presented it as purely futile and generation-destroying—a rent in the fabric of European history and culture. Trott, while sympathetic to the historians’ complaints, is interested in why this interpretation of the war has stuck. Turning to publishing archives and contemporaneous reviews, he tries to account for (and call into question) what he calls the “narrative of disillusionment” (2) about the war, its effects, and its meaning.

Trott's book contains much to appreciate: first and foremost, it provides a wealth of information about the publication and reception histories of war texts. Trott has done his research, and this book will prove a valuable resource for any scholar or student who is interested in these areas. His attention to archival material is complemented by a long view of history, which provides an expansive and panoramic understanding of the construction of war mythologies. One chapter aims to provide a more detailed look at the publishing trajectory of two World War I memoirs (Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero [1929] and Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth [1933]), but the book overall is more of a historiographical survey of World War I literature and publishing trends, starting with the books that came out in the more immediate postwar years—particularly during the war book “boom” period of the very late 1920s—and ending with two memoirs published in 2008 by the last living British war veterans. The first chapter is a particularly useful examination of the shift in the 1920s from the publishing industry's focus on generally pro-war texts to its promotion of those that expressed disillusionment and dismay. The later chapters provide shorter examinations of the publication of books about the Great War during World War II, the 1960s, and then the early 2000s. In general, Trott is most interested in popular, not critical, reception (though the line between the two can seem blurry, especially when book reviews function as a primary source of evidence).

Overall, Publishers, Readers, and the Great War offers a strong reminder that there was not a monolithic experience of World War I, and that retrospective accounts often respond as much to the myths of the war as to the “truths” of it. Trott reiterates throughout the book that scholars and writers should be more careful about making grand claims concerning the experience and the effects of war, especially when proclaiming that this war was a slaughter without meaning. Trott sees this interpretation of the war as one of the dominant “myths” of the war—one of the “simplifications or distortions of the more complex historical record” that has led to a blanket view that the war was “horrific and futile” (10). Implicit in his project is an argument that the literary-critical world, in particular, has reinforced this mythology because the “narrative of disillusionment was constructed by a small band of now-canonical writers and poets whose attitudes and experiences were not representative of the average soldier” (2).

This last point at times feels overdone (at least to a literary critic); one of the reasons why people read literature is that we want to see the singular, rather than the “average”—which is, of course, itself an imaginary concept. Thus, while it does seem important to correct the critical and popular tendency to remember World War I as only a meaningless slaughter, such correction can go too far. When describing what young writers of the late 1920s and 1930s were reading about World War I, Trott writes that their interest in texts like the memoirs by Edmund Blunden (Undertones of War [1928]), Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer [1930]), and Robert Graves (Good-bye to All That [1929]), combined with reading of poetry by Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, led to an understanding of the war based on individual (and often disillusioned) experience. Trott notes, “The personal, the partial and the emotive took precedence over dispassionate, overarching accounts. This privileging of the literary over the historical is what continues to rile many historians today” (77). Undoubtedly they are riled, but it is unclear why literary representation should be a threat, for it occupies a methodologically and ethically different realm from the historical accounts that aim to provide an accurate description of a conflict. I think here of Margot Norris's account in Writing War in the Twentieth Century (2000), in which she interrogates the role that literature plays in representing war, and concludes that “art can be seen to seize what is left over for its own terrain, a leftover in the form of the human remainder, the affective residue, the suffering that military histories imply but don't voice, the inner experience that can't be mapped, charted, or otherwise quantified” (21). Here is one general answer to the question of why a narrative of disillusionment and trauma emerged from World War I texts—because that affective residue could not be conveyed in another way. Trott does acknowledge this, though more emphasis on the slippery nature of terms like “facts” and “history” could make this point even more apparent throughout. Overall, however, this book presents a clear and corrective illustration of how powerfully the publishing industry and the literature it distributed shaped the cultural memory of World War I and, by extension, how careful we must be when making generalizations about historical events.