Litarature Durring The War

It can be said that no great book about WWI was published during the war. The most famous were published postwar. Some of these were All Quiet On The Western Front (1929), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and The Guns of August (1962).

The war also had a large affect on British literature. Many political and social changes happened because of the war, and those changes sparked new opinions and view points.The war also brought about the subject of individual faith in the effectiveness of governments and their militia. This was a heavily critiqued subject after the war. There is a drastic change in prewar and postwar literature because of these recent topics. England also had a great interest in war literature during the 1920s and '30s. This interest died down because of the Second World War, but was rekindled in the 1960s when there was renewed interest in WWI around its fiftieth anniversary.   

As for reading material in the trenches, soldiers read anything they could. This usually consisted of dime store novels, magazines, or even, if they were lucky, plays by Shakespeare or other classic literature. Sometimes magazines were printed at the front (this depended on if the trench was lucky enough to have acquired a printing press), but for the most part books had to be brought in.

 

German soldiers reading in trench