Wilfred Owen's Voices

Disability in British poetry of the First World War

“…In Britain, however, where the focus of disability studies has been more on the social sciences than the humanities, disability perspectives on literature have been slower to arrive. Therefore, although the poetry of the First World War has generated studies of nation (Marsland 1991), community (Kerr 1993), class (Hynes 1998), gender (Reilly 1981) and sexuality (Caesar 1993;Campbell 1997), disability passes largely unnoticed, with even discussions of the body not directly confronting physical impairment (Comer 1996). Only in the last 15 years has British literary disability studies taken off with the work of Stuart Murray at Leeds University and David Bolt at Liverpool Hope University; the launch of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies in 2006; and the foundation of two book series 'Representations' published by Liverpool University Press and 'Literary Disability Studies' published by Palgrave Macmillan.…”

“…The First World War drove men into positions of passivity previously characteristic of women, both at the Front where the 'dominance of long-range artillery, the machine gun and barbed wire had immobilized combat' and at home when they returned with disabled bodies that no longer conformed to sexual and physical norms (Campbell 1997, 829). Although patriotism halted the suffrage campaign when war broke out, some men had difficulty in reconciling women's quest for electoral equality with exemption from combat and particularly resented their part in exhorting men to fight (Kerr 1993). Such indignation was misplaced.…”