Remembering the First World War after 9/11: Pat Barker’s life class and Toby’s Room

Remembering the First World War after 9/11: Pat Barker’s life class and Toby’s Room

Pat Barker’s most famous novels are her Regeneration trilogy (1991-1995), culminating in the Booker Prize-winning novel, The Ghost Road. Her most recent novels, Life Class (2007) and Toby’s Room (2012), return to the subject of the First World War with a different focus: non-combative personnel in the war. What has changed in a global sense between the publication of the trilogy and the more recent novels is, of course, the occurrence of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war in Afghanistan and Iraq. While there has been a great deal of critical focus on the significance of 9/11 for our understanding of another of Barker’s late novels, Double Vision (2003), its influence on representations of war, trauma and violence in Life Class and Toby’s Room has not been discussed. This chapter explores how the events of 9/11 may have altered perceptions and representations of earlier conflict – in this case, the First World War.

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