Stories Told and Untold: Re-Gendering the First World War through Centenary Narratives

Abstract

Women’s stories of war in the twentieth century challenged classic (masculinised) war narratives and recorded women’s varied roles and experiences of war. For this inscription, writers often adopted and adapted the form of the short story, a genre which has been judged particularly suited to transitions and shifting subjectivities. The final decades of the last century also brought considerable blurring of genres, a transgression of the divide between the critical and the creative, the verifiable and the fictional. This chapter looks at the volume 1914—Goodbye to All That. Writers on the Conflict between Life and Art, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw in 2014, and discusses the hybrid texts from this collection of narrative essays that are written by women (Ali Smith, Kamila Shamsie, Elif Shafak, NoViolet Bulawayo, Xiaolu Guo, Jeannette Winterson), particularly those by authors usually categorised as British: Smith, Winterson and Guo. Their critical narratives of war, in dialogue with past and present voices, reveal crucial shifts in twenty-first century thinking on war, subjectivities, and writing, greatly influenced by an increased awareness of planetarity, and expressed through a skilled empathic use of the short story form.