Wilfred Owen's Demolishing of the Romantic Image of Soldier: A New Historicist Analysis of "Dolce Est Decorum Est" and "Exposure".

Document Type : Brief summaries of Dissertations.

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Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts Aswan University

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Abstract:
In this paper, I am analyzing selected poems by Wilfred Owen's war poetry which represent The Great War according to the tenets of New Historicism. Before the WWI, there was a Mythic romantic image of war and soldier. The soldier was considered a sort of knight. He was represented as noble, semi-god and savior. War used to be waged for the good of the society and nation, so it was represented as a noble mission. History was in the background of the analysis of the poetry that was produced during the massive events. On the contrary, New Historicism used to use the texts of history in analyzing the literary texts and study the interaction between them to reach a better understanding of the text. Wilfred Owen, as one of the poets of the trenches, represented in his poems the dark side of the war, its reality. Owen derives his importance from his devotion to the subject of war poetry and his death few days before the end of the war. He was an officer in the British army During WWI and wrote some of the finest war poetry of the twentieth century. The analysis of the Selected poems depends on anecdotes, autobiography entries for other soldiers who wrote/talked about their experience during the war in documentary television and radio programs, magazine and journal articles, propaganda posters and books.

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