Beschreibung:
This international collection of essays gives fresh insight into the lives and perspectives of the modernist authors who lived and wrote in the shadow of war. These essays offer a link through wartime experience, as the fragmented, violent, and traumatic period demanded unique forms of expression.
New Modernist Studies, while reviving and revitalizing modernist studies through lively, scholarly debate about historicity, aesthetics, politics, and genres, is struggling with important questions concerning the delineation that makes discussion fruitful and possible. This volume aims to explore and clarify the position of the so-called ‘core’ of literary modernism in its seminal engagement with the Great War. In studying the years of the Great War, we find ourselves once more studying ‘the giants,’ about whom there is so much more to say, as well as adding hitherto marginalized writers – and a few visual artists – to the canon. The contention here is that these war years were seminal to the development of a distinguishable literary practice which is called ‘modernism,’ but perhaps could be further delineated as ‘Great War modernism,’ a practice whose aesthetic merits can be addressed through formal analysis. This collection of essays offers new insight into canonical British/American/European modernism of the Great War period using the critical tools of contemporary, expansionist modernist studies. By focusing on war, and on the experience of the soldier and of those dealing with issues of war and survival, these studies link the unique forms of expression found in modernism with the fragmented, violent, and traumatic experience of the time.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Great War Modernism
Nanette Norris
Section One: Non-Combatant Responses – Nostalgia, Legacies, and Recuperations
Homeric Cheeses and the Breast of a Decrepit Nurse:
Ruskin and Marinetti on Art, War, and Peace
Michael J. K. Walsh
The Irrepressible Conflict: The Southern Agrarians and World War One
David A. Davis
“A Reconstructionary Tale”:
Ford Madox Ford’s Georgic Response to World War One
Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy
Non-Combatancy, Narrative, and Henry Green’s Pack My Bag
Taryn Okuma
Painting Abstraction/Observing Destruction at the Front
Graeme Stout
Section Two: High Modernists and the Shock of War
World War I and Messianic Voids in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Camelia Raghinaru
H. D. and the Secrets of Redemption
Nanette Norris
Violence and Laughter in Women in Love
Joyce Wexler
You Give Them Money, They Give You a Stuffed Dog:
Modernism and Survival in The Sun Also Rises
Gregory M. Dandeles
Section Three: Soldiers and Soldiering
Anonymity, Transnational Identity, and A German Deserter’s War Experience
Erika Kuhlman
Rosenberg’s Half-Life between Romanticism and Modernism
James Brown
From Drills to Dreams:
“Making the Mould” of Retreat in John Dos Passos’Three Soldiers
Matthew David Perry
A Necessary Aesthetics:
Modernism’s Role in Stabilizing War Narratives Through Poetry
‒ David Jones to Brian Turner (and Beyond)
Travis L. Martin
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index