In his seminal work, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell exaplains:
The language is that which two generations of readers had been accustomed to associate with the quiet action of personal control and Christian self-abnegation ("sacrifice"), as well as With more violent actions of aggression and defense. The tutors in this special diction had been the boys' books of George Alfred Henty; the male-romances of Rider, Haggard; the poems of Robert Bridges; and especially the Arthurian poems of Tennyson and the pseudo-medieval romances of William Morris. We can set out this "raised," essentially feudal language in a table of equivalents: |
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This system of "high" diction was not the least of the ultimate casualties of the war. But its staying power astonishing. As late as 1918 it was still posssible for some men who had actually fought to sustain the old rhetoric.
(Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 21-23) |