Full Description
The First World War at once extends and marks a departure from established understandings of the literature and culture of the First World War. In a series of compelling readings, scholars who have shaped the field rethink the intersections between war, literature, culture, and modernity across an international range of writers.
Their attention ranges from combatant poets Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, David Jones, and Robert Service to intrepid nurse-memoirists Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden, to civilian intellectuals as diverse as H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Anna Akhmatova, and Rabindranath Tagore. At the same time, there is engagement with the visual arts, including the film The Battle of the Somme, the sculpture, lithographs and woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz and the interwar imaginative engagement with zeppelins. What results is both a daring expansion of the canon and a reframing of the terms of the debate.
Silence, sacrifice, the unfathomable, maximal intensity, proximity and distance, the divide between the living and the dead, the transfiguration of the skies, resistance, empire and cosmopolitanism are some of the themes that emerge in essays that simultaneously illuminate and take us beyond the parenthesis of the war years. The terms 'war writing', 'modernism', and 'modernity' are themselves revisited as the cast of internationally renowned contributors embed the conflict in a broader and more global understanding of twentieth-century literature and culture.
Contents
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Preface and acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One: Unfathomable
1: Kate McLoughlin: Three War Veterans Who Don't Tell War Stories
2: Hope Wolf: Scaling War: Poetic Calibration and Mythic Measures in David Jones's In Parenthesis
3: Vincent Sherry: Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economy of 'Sacrifice' in the Great War
Part Two: Scoping the War
4: Sarah Cole: Civilians Writing the War: Metaphor, Proximity, Action
5: Laura Marcus: First World War Film and the Face of Death
6: Christine Froula: The Zeppelin in the Sky of the Mind
7: Mark Rawlinson: Dissent and the Literature of the First World War: Wyndham Lewis and Henry Williamson
Part Three: 'Cosmopolitan Sympathies'?
8: Jahan Ramazani: 'Cosmopolitan Sympathies': Poetry of the First Global War
9: Margaret Higonnet: Maternal Cosmopoetics: Käthe Kollwitz and European Women Poets of the First World War
10: Claire Buck: Encountering War, Encountering Others
11: Santanu Das: Entangled Emotions: Race, Encounters and Anti-Colonial Cosmopolitanism
Index
