Monograph

Humour in British First World War Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34051-2

While well-known examples of First World War literature often emphasize enormous emotional disruption and the war’s extremes, other writers used humour to encourage a gentle, mild amusement, drawing on familiar, popular genres and forms used before 1914. In humorous portrayals of the war, tameness outdoes the unmanageable and the temperate exceeds the extraordinary. Humour in British First World War Literature is based on little-known primary material uncovered from detailed archival research, as well as works that, though written by celebrated authors, tend not to be placed in the canon of Great War literature. Each chapter examines key examples of literary texts, ranging from short stories and poetry to theatre and periodicals, in doing so investigating the complex representational, political, and social significance of the tame strand in humorous Great War literature.

Peer-Reviewed articles

Anderson, Emily, ‘An “unseemly joke”: Service-author Stories and Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937)’, Journal of Modern Literature, 42, 2 (2022), pp. 34-51 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/852071

—, ‘“There are many strange animals that will repay […] study”: Humour and Identity in Trench-Newspaper Natural Histories’, Literature & History, 31, 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1177%2F03061973221091877

—, ‘“There Was a Young Girl of the Somme, | Who Sat on a Number Five Bomb”: The Representation of Violence in First World War Trench Newspaper Nonsense Rhymes’, Literature & History, 27 (2018), 129–47 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306197318792388

—, ‘The 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary in Scotland: Concepts of Nation-Ness and Cultural Prestige in Anniversary Tributes to the Playwright’, Shakespeare, 12 (2016), 185–210 https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2015.1042022

Selected conference Papers

‘Humour and the Written Representation of the Great War, 1914 – 1918’, Humour and the First World War, The Open University in London (June 2018)

‘Absurdity and Comic Absurdity in British First World War Literature’, Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention (NeMLA 2017), Baltimore (March 2017)

‘No Time But the Present: representations of tragi-comic time in First World War Poetry’, 9th Conference of the International Society for First World War Studies: War Time, the University of Oxford (November 2016)

‘“A great joke”? The Role of Humour in Robert Graves’ Representation of the First World War’, 13th International Robert Graves Society Conference, St John’s College, the University of Oxford (September 2016)

‘Soldiers as Comic Heroes in British First World War Texts’, Globalising and Localising the Great War Graduate Conference, the University of Oxford (March 2016)