The Genesis of Birdsong

Faulks: Birdsong

In this course, Dr Allison Adler Kroll (University of Oxford) explores Sebastian Faulks' 1993 novel, Birdsong. We begin by thinking about the genesis of the novel – why did Faulks want to write a story about the First World War in the early nineties? After that, we think about the significance of the title of the novel – 'Birdsong' – and its epigraph, a poem by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, before turning in the third module to the novel's seven-part structure. From the fourth to the ninth modules, we think about the significance of particular characters or groups of characters, including Stephen Wraysford, Jack Firebrace, Isabelle Azaire, and others, before moving on in the tenth module to think about the various settings of the novel – pre-war Amiens, the trenches and tunnels of the war itself, and 1970s England. Finally, in the eleventh module, we think about some of the key themes in the novel, its literary influences, and the importance of faith.

The Genesis of Birdsong

In this section, we think about how Faulks came to write Birdsong: why did he want to write a story set (mostly) in the First World War in the early 90s?