Talk:Good-Bye to All That

Impact of publication of Graves' life?

A section about how this novel lost Graves most of his friends and literary connections should be added. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.35.253.56 (talk) 20:55, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

The introduction could use some work

"He devotes a large part of the book to his experiences of the First World War, where he gives a detailed description of trench warfare, including the tragic incompetence of the Battle of Loos. Many readers will be interested in his secondhand description of the killing of German prisoners of war by British, Canadian and Australian troops. Although he had not witnessed any incidents himself and knew of no large-scale massacres, he knew of a number of incidents where prisoners had been killed individually or in small groups, and he believed that a large proportion of Germans who surrendered never made it to prisoner-of-war camps.

Graves was severely traumatized by his war experience. After he was wounded, he endured a five day train journey amid squalor and unchanged bandages. The trench telephone scared him such that he never lived with the technology for the rest of his life (he received an electric shock because the line was struck by lightning). Upon his return home, he describes being haunted by ghosts and nightmares. Laura Riding, Graves' lover, is credited with being a "spiritual and intellectual midwife" to the work, which made him famous.[2]"

Only the last sentence of that is opening material. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.35.253.56 (talk) 23:38, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

What does "savaging" mean?

It says that 2 authors "famously savaged a copy". What is savaging it? Criticising it? Tearing it up? Committing some deviancy? What was that about, anyway? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 20:13, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

And why? zafiroblue05 | Talk 18:38, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

This is covered in the Introduction of one of the revised editions. I think it was Sassoon and another officer in Graves battaliion that basically took the book and wrote lots of marginalia, planning on writing a scathing rebuttal. Since they wussed out, it's not that important really, other than to note others didn't like some of what he said. --64.142.36.76 (talk) 02:02, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm moving the passage here as it's been uncited for years and ambiguous.

Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon, deeply suspicious of the work, famously defaced a copy (now housed in the Royal Welch Fusiliers archive in Caernarfon).

--Quadalpha (talk) 22:55, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Plot Summaries

I am currently in the process of writing a plot summary for this autobiography by a leading author of his generation. Once I have finished this, I will carry out improvement on the literary themes section by discussing the novel in the context of its time. Ivankinsman 20:12, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

You really need to read Item #7 of Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information:

Plot summaries. Wikipedia articles on published works should contain real-world context and sourced analysis, offering detail on a work's achievements, impact or historical significance, not solely a summary of that work's plot. A plot summary may be appropriate as an aspect of a larger topic. See Wikipedia:Notability (fiction).

Your "summaries" tend to be Way Too Long!

Real World Context

Is there an official Wiki policy on the framing of statements that come from the work? In this case the way the wiki is written seems to take as a given that German POWs were executed. That may have happened, I have no idea, but there is no citation for it other than the work itself. Perhaps a rephrasing along the lines of "Graves claims that..." would suffice. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.63.9.46 (talk) 11:07, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

As for "discussing the novel in the context of its time," read Wikipedia:No original research and be sure you have some cited references, or else your contribution may be reverted ... please don't turn the Themes section into another rambling, unfinished monologue ... "(to be continued)" has no place in a Wikipedia article!! That's the kind of thing you should be doing in a sandbox in user space, not in main article space, and then copy&paste it upon completion ... as the edit history shows, you compose your contributions as you make them, and apparently don't know how to use the Show preview button ... article or talk page comment, if it will require more that a few simple changes, or more time than it takes to smoke a cigarette or drink a cup of coffee, then it's sandbox time. (See User talk:68.239.79.82/filmographies for an example.)

When using <blockquote>, you don't need to put it in quotes, and certainly not single quotes ... use double quotes or italics.

You also need to learn how to use <ref> … </ref> tags so that you don't have the same identical text in three different references ... besides, when you are quoting from the subject of an article, citing it as a source is kind of redundant.

And don't go "blanking" articles, or you'll get blocked from editing for a while ... I've seen it happen; it's not a pretty sight. —72.75.70.147 (talk · contribs) 03:44, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

It says that 2 authors "famously savaged a copy". What is savaging it? Criticising it? Tearing it up? Committing some deviancy? What was that about, anyway? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 20:13, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

And why? zafiroblue05 | Talk 18:38, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I am currently in the process of writing a plot summary for this autobiography by a leading writer of his generation. Once I have finished this, I will carry out improvement on the literary themes section by discussing the novel in the context of its time. Ivankinsman 20:12, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

I have now completed the plot summary as well as the literary themes section. Ivankinsman 20:39, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

I deleted the comment about Sassoon and Blunden savaging a copy. This is highly improbably as both men were close friends of Robert Graves and there is nothing antagonistic written about them in his autobiography as far as I can see. Ivankinsman 09:37, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Merge duplicated articles

There are currently two articles ...

• Good-Bye to All That (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) - created on 16 February 2002
• Good-bye to All That (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) - created on 13 June 2007

Apparently, both Ivankinsman (talk · contribs) and AnonMoos (talk · contribs) have recently made extensive edits to the first one, and then Ivankinsman "cloned" it with a different spelling, and tried to delete the first one by "blanking" it ... since neither editor bothered to link the articles to their discussions, I have only recently become aware of the fact that the second one exists, having previously left comments on the talk page of the older one.

Please see "Page blanking" on Ivankinsman's talk page and the comments that follow it ("Good-[bB]ye to All That" and "Duplicated article") for more detail.

Today I have added {{merge}} tags to both, and suggest that the older one be retained (a) because of its longer edit history, and (b) more articles are linked to it, either directly, or through redirects ... Happy Editing! —72.75.70.147 10:14, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, the newer one is more accurate now - and complete e.g. the literary themes section - in terms of the copy in the article and I thought it wouldn't need too much thinking in terms of the redirects. I would STRONGLY ADVISE KEEPING THIS ONEIvankinsman 06:58, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Whichever, a merge is a no-brainer - the only choice should be for the method and eventual name required. Of rather the other way round; which is the prefered name then the method should retain the most history and absorb the best content. :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)}/_(Desk) 08:33, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

I strongly recommend that the edit history going back to 15:15, 16 February 2002 be retained ... that is also the one with the most articles linked to it ... as for which name is used, I guess the one with the lower-case "bye" is preferable. —72.75.85.234 16:47, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Merge: it's very hard to see any grounds for opposition to this. Xn4 22:25, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Of course no one disputes that they need to be merged -- it's just going to be a rather tedious process of reconciling the two divergent versions... AnonMoos 19:55, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Where did the title of the book come from?

I saw an edition of Aeschylus' Agamemnon recently, in a translation which doesn't seem to be online, not at Project Gutenberg nor anyplace else. In the scene where the Herald makes it back home to Greece and delivers his speech about how rough the war was and how relieved he is to have survived, he speaks of the dead. The war is over for them, as it is over for him, and "goodbye to all that / Glad I am to say it." If someone has access to a print copy and can verify this, it would be an interesting nugget to drop into the article. The Sanity Inspector (talk) 04:11, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

• I saw that edition again, and it looks like it is later than Graves' book, so nevermind. The translator was probably alluding to Graves rather than the other way around. The Sanity Inspector (talk) 13:51, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

2023

• Wasn't Graves a classical Greek scholar, familiar with the classics in the original? Wouldn't it seem likely that he encountered the words in some form of the original and identified strongly with both the meaning and the context? 60.240.32.226 (talk) 11:34, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Anyway, the meaning of the title was good-bye to England, and to many of the preoccupations that were considered important in his earlier life, including trying to maintain middle-class respectability, as he went off with Laura Riding (Jackson). The Laura Riding thing didn't work out too well, but he lived outside England from then on (except during the WW2 years). AnonMoos (talk) 03:44, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

"Plot description"

Is it fair to use the term, "Plot description" as a heading in an article about an autobiography? That hardly seems NPOV. Pehaps "Synopsis" would have fewer connotations of fiction? --Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.67.119.219 (talk) 07:07, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Copyright problem

This article has been reverted to an earlier version as part of a large-scale clean-up project of multiple article copyright infringement. Text merged into this article from Good-bye to All That duplicated at least in part material from the book The Modern British Novel (see [1]). Other content added by the same contributor may have been copied from other sources and has been removed in accordance with Wikipedia:Copyright violations. Earlier text must not be restored, unless it can be verified to be free of infringement. Content added by other contributors subsequent to the introduction of this material can be restored if it does not merge with this text to create a derivative work. For legal reasons, Wikipedia cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material; such additions must be deleted. Contributors may use sources as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 17:23, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Killing of prisoners

Almost a quarter of the text deals with the killing of German prisoners. This seems rather disproportionate for second-hand stories about something which Graves himself never witnessed and which occupy less than 1 page in a 300-page book.RichWA (talk) 06:57, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Used to be a small part of a large article, until most of it was deleted for being a copyright violation... AnonMoos (talk) 09:18, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Not necessarily disputing that, but given that this is a short article for a relatively important book the answere is to expand the rest of the article. PatGallacher (talk) 11:31, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Sections

I just created several, but more work is needed. The lead now contains information not in the body, which needs redistributing. Rumiton (talk) 10:48, 13 March 2013 (UTC)