Revisiting Regeneration

Although more than 70 years had passed since the Armistice, the history of the First World War was still a living political issue when Regeneration was published in 1991. Survivors of the so-called ‘lost generation’, who had come of age in wartime, were dying. The novel marks a watershed, as Barker represents how a profound sense of absence and loss had strengthened through the postwar decades. Regeneration captures both the living hell of remembering and the attempts at recovery that had defined the lives of those involved. It is a novel not only about the process of bringing damaged people back to life following war trauma, but also about regenerating understandings and meanings, and its positive reception in the early 1990s is now seen to signify a key moment in the revisionism of First World War history.

The novel’s subject matter — its recognition of the prevalence of ‘shell shock’ among British soldiers returning from the trenches — was a key reason why it shot to prominence. Regeneration conveys that experimental context in which doctors were discovering various new treatments for their patients, and was written at a time when still only relatively little was known about shell shock and discussion of mental illness was a taboo, so Barker appears to be revealing secret information which had been deliberately concealed.