«Close Encounters in War Journal», numero monografico Personal Narratives: Experience, Memory, and Storytelling, 7 (2024),

War has been the object of narration and storytelling since ancient times. Epics, myths, and legends transmitted the memory of heroes’ deeds, thus shaping and consolidating the cultural identities of local communities and ethnic enclaves and later nation-states and empires. Personal narratives about war have seldom reached the public before the nineteenth century. This caused scholars to believe that anonymous soldiers, who constituted the core of all armies in any historical period, never wrote about their experiences. Writing, on the other hand, was a skill far from being achieved by everyone in the pre-modern era. Only a few combatants could account for their war experiences in writing, for example, through letters, diaries and memoirs, a small number of which has reached the public as books. Furthermore, while personal accounts of war mostly remained confined to military, political, and intelligence communication – and are therefore stored in archives and mostly accessible as historical sources – the first testimonies of war that became works of public interest did not appear in the form of autobiographies or memoirs. If the nineteenth century was characterised by an increasing interest in war personal narratives, the phenomenon assumed a mass scale with the outbreak of the Great War, mainly for two reasons: the enormous mass of soldiers involved in the conflict on a global scale for over four years; and the diffusion of literacy among the mass of enlisted soldiers. Scholars claim that between 1914 and 1918, over 65 billion letters circulated between the frontlines and Italy, France, Germany, and Great Britain. If personal narratives from the nineteenth-century wars amount to hundreds, above all distributed in Western countries, autobiographical accounts of the Great War amount to many thousands, spread all over the world. New groups of authors appear in this recent tradition, such as prisoners of war (POWs), women, and members of colonial troops. As wars became more and more global, during the twentieth century, so did the more and more established genre of war narratives, which eventually became a consistent section of contemporary literature (despite the debate that saw literary scholars question the literariness of personal narratives), or at least of the international book market. As a genre, personal narratives have evolved over two centuries, passing from being almost exclusively memoirs written by high-ranking officers (mostly noble) to consisting of a much more multifaceted variety of expressive forms including letters, diaries, autobiographical sketches, poems, published or unpublished memoirs, oral histories and autobiographical fiction. After a long-lasting prejudice that banned personal narratives from the history of war and conflict, which was relegated to the disciplinary field of Military History, since the 1960s historians have begun to look at these narrations as valid and valuable sources of historical knowledge, thus giving impulse, after the so-called “cultural” and “narrative” turns after the 1970s, to the birth of sub-disciplines such as Micro-History, History of Mentality, Cultural History, Oral History and more recently the History of the Emotions. Working with personal narratives is a challenging scholarly enterprise due to the flickering and multifaceted nature of this kind of written expression, which is transversal to literary genres while including forms, styles, and registers typical of the spoken language. Personal narratives can hardly provide an overall comprehension and depiction of war, as they can inform about events that occurred on a smaller scale and the perception that human beings have of the war as a direct experience. Therefore, working with personal narratives often requires intellectual flexibility and the ability to blend different disciplinary approaches by borrowing diverse methodological, critical and analytical tools.