Life writing, fiction and modernism in British narratives of the First World War

For decades, Britain's cultural memory of the First World War has been dominated by poetry, the principal literary interpretation of the war taught in schools throughout the country. This poetry, argues Max Saunders, is often autobiographic and complements the memoirs that many writers penned in trying to express their experiences of the conflict – showing a complex and fluid relationship between autobiography and narrative. What is largely marginalised in British cultural memory is the novel; yet it is perhaps in this literary form, and in the work of Ford Madox Ford above all, that the most innovative interpretations of the conflict can be found.