Research Information System
THE JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF LANGUAGES AND HISTORY-GEOGRAPHY OF ANKARA UNIVERSITY, vol.51, pp.65-88, 2011 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
War poetry, particularly the poems scribed in the trenches - the burning centre
of the combat, generally has a dark and sombre tone as it speaks of violence,
bloodshed and death. Psychologically devastated by the appalling experience of the
trench warfare, the war poet occupies the liminal space between life and death. He
sometimes imagines himself dead; sometimes he converses with the dead, or
conversely the dead communicate with him through dreams or phantasms. The
recurrent images of dead soldiers, detached body parts, unrecognisable corpses,
and ghostly imaginings of traumatised mind create an otherworldly atmosphere,
drawing the genre into the terrain of the uncanny, which has been conventionally
associated with gothic and fantastic literature. The present study explores the
interpretive possibilities that the theory of the uncanny may offer in analysing the
traumatic war experience and the presentation of the idea of nationalism in the
poetry of the First World War. The present study, as indicated in the title, is a
search for the uncanny presented in the poetry of the Great War; however, it also
includes other forms of war narratives, such as memorial monuments, memoirs and
letters in order to compare different discourses that came together around the war
and its rhetoric.