The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque is a new literary and cultural history of the First World War in France. It offers readers a fresh perspective on wartime popular culture, uncovering the attitudes and outlooks of the people who lived through the war one hundred years ago. The book develops a counternarrative to postwar interpretations of the infantryman as passive victim or active resister, focusing instead on the mechanisms through which soldiers and civilians resigned themselves to the war but imagined themselves as survivors. They were able to do so by reactivating a ... More

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque is a new literary and cultural history of the First World War in France. It offers readers a fresh perspective on wartime popular culture, uncovering the attitudes and outlooks of the people who lived through the war one hundred years ago. The book develops a counternarrative to postwar interpretations of the infantryman as passive victim or active resister, focusing instead on the mechanisms through which soldiers and civilians resigned themselves to the war but imagined themselves as survivors. They were able to do so by reactivating a form of storytelling-the picaresque-whose central concern had always been the survival of a nonheroic protagonist in a hostile and chaotic world. During the Great War, French novelists, journalists, graphic artists, and cultural critics drew both consciously and unconsciously upon the long and rich European picaresque tradition. With its spirit of self-preservation as opposed to self-sacrifice and its affirmation of the value of life over death, the picaresque was a literary and cultural mode uniquely appropriate for expressing and attenuating the anxieties provoked by modern, industrialized warfare. The French reinvented the picaro as an apt hero for the modern age and positioned the picaresque as the dominant ethos of the modern cultural imagination.