SOURCE: Tulloss, Thomas. “Et Ego in Arcadia: Death in ‘Resurrection,’ John Peale Bishop's World War One Fiction.” Focus on Robert Graves and His Contemporaries 1, no. 7 (1988): 18-23.

In the following essay, Tulloss views John Peale Bishop's “Resurrection” as an anti-romantic, naturalistic perspective on the destruction of war and a part of the “post-World War re-evaluation of the optimism implicit in pastoral and romantic traditions in American literature as it had existed before the European conflict.”

John Peale Bishop, whose literary reputation has settled comfortably within the middle rank of American writers published between the World Wars, was one whose 1918 experiences of the battlefields of the first great conflict influenced his work profoundly, as was the case with other, better known authors. The pastoral spirit that had existed pre-war—before “the lights went out all over”—found itself invaded and superceded by a fascination with the naturalistic and the grotesque...