What Does War Literature Document? : Experience and Fiction from the Great War through the Historian’s Eyes

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World War I writing in France has been the subject of much debate about its truthfulness and authenticity as documentation about war experience. This writing, which was very prolific during the war years, has often been considered as part of the function of witness. The soldier-writers who legitimized their production through their lived experience as well as the reception of the works during and after the war contributed to shaping the idea that these texts were above all chronicles of the war experience. Jean Norton Cru?s critical work adds another layer to this interpretation in that it refutes all other functions but that of witness. Historiographic reception again took up the idea, sometimes in an acritical way, that soldier-writers? production had an exclusively experiential finality. However, historicization critical of this social, literary and cultural phenomenon shows that the stakes go well beyond experience alone.