Literary and cultural-historical debate about the First World War has focused on whether the conflict inaugurated a new modernity (in Paul Fussell’s terms, a specifically ironic consciousness) or whether it revealed deep continuities, particularly in the area of memorialization. The debate can productively be widened by expanding the scope of critical attention to include, not only English trench poetry, but also the creative production of women, non-combatants, civilians, and writers and artists from Europe and the then British Empire. This enlarged canon, which in this book ranges from the B ... More

Literary and cultural-historical debate about the First World War has focused on whether the conflict inaugurated a new modernity (in Paul Fussell’s terms, a specifically ironic consciousness) or whether it revealed deep continuities, particularly in the area of memorialization. The debate can productively be widened by expanding the scope of critical attention to include, not only English trench poetry, but also the creative production of women, non-combatants, civilians, and writers and artists from Europe and the then British Empire. This enlarged canon, which in this book ranges from the British combatant poets Wilfred Owen and David Jones to the writers and nurses Mary Borden and Enid Bagnold, the civilian novelists H. G. Wells and Virginia Woolf, and the international authors Robert Service, Berta Lask, Claire Studer Goll, Ricarda Huch, Gertrud Kolmar, Anna Akhmatova and Rabindranath Tagore, enables us to rethink the very meanings of terms such as ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’. Literature itself is illuminated through juxtaposition with film, photography and fine art. Three areas in particular reveal the ways in which literature, culture and the war coalesce in a putative modernity: the unfathomable, intensity and ‘cosmopolitanism’. These emerge via investigation of issues such as shellshock, sacrifice, death, aerial bombing, resistance, empire and race.