War gothic of the western front: Decay, landscape, and identity in WWI fiction

The First World War was a unique and unrepeatable Gothic event, and so, this thesis examines its modern and postmodern literary accounts within the War Gothic framework. Analysing Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear, Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way, and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, it looks at the relationships of transformative states; specifically, the decomposition and destruction of the body, the landscape, identity, and masculinity along the trenches of the Western Front. Moreover, this thesis explores how the Gothic nature of WWI affects identity politics in the four novels according to personal, cultural, and national authorial subject positions. The War Gothic unites the German and French narratives with the previously unrepresented, and now re-imagined, Irish Catholic and Indigenous Canadian war experiences for the Gothic communicates the ineffable complexities of human nature and of war.