Remapping The Home Front

An examination of how wartime rhetoric in World War I influenced the home front fiction of four British women writers -- Violet Hunt, Rose Macaulay, Stella Benson, and Rebecca West.

'Making History New' explores how several British modernists such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Rebecca West, applied the experimental methods of literary modernism to the writing of narrative history and historical novels.

Bringing new insights from genre theory to bear on the work of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West, this study explores how West's use of and combinations of multiple genres (often in single works) was informed and furthered by her subversive feminist goals. Rebecca West's Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres analyzes West's sense of genres as dynamic and strategic processes with transgressive political ends rather than as fixed and reified taxonomies, a radical new approach at the time that is now mirrored in much contemporary theory. Surveying her oeuvre from this point of view, the book goes on to examine systematically West's writing from 1911-1941, including her early journalism and criticism, such novels as The Return of the Soldier and her controversial multi-genre epic Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

This book provides an analytical model for reading a large body of modernist works by women. The authors document the publication and reception history of E. H. Young's novels, make a significant contribution to the field of 'homeculture,' and show that the fictional embodiment of home in Young, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Lettice Cooper, E. M. Delafield, Stella Gibbons, Storm Jameson, and E. Arnot Robertson epitomizes the symbiosis between architecture and literature, or between the house and the novel.

This volume uncovers the ideas concerning everyday life circulating in the burgeoning feminist periodical culture of Britain in the early twentieth century. Barbara Green explores the ways in which the feminist press used its correspondence columns, women’s pages, fashion columns and short fictions to display the quiet hum of everyday life that provided the backdrop to the more dramatic events of feminist activism such as street marches or protests. Positioning itself at the interface of periodical studies and everyday life studies, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life illuminates the more elusive aspects of the periodical archive through a study of those periodical forms that are particularly well-suited to conveying the mundane. Feminist journalists such as Rebecca West, Teresa Billington-Greig, E. M. Delafield and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence provided new ways of conceptualizing the significance of domestic life and imagining new possibilities for daily routines. /p>

The Return of the Soldier tells the story of a shell-shocked soldier who returns home from the First World War believing that he is in love with a working-class woman from his past, rather than married to his aristocratic wife. His family and doctor must decide whether to allow him to remain safely in his delusion, or to bring him back to reality and return him to the front. A brief novel with a seemingly simple plot, it is a classic of modernist literature and provides a point of entry into discussions of some of the twentieth century’s most enduring themes. Appendices include textual variants, patriotic and antiwar verse from World War I, war journalism by West, contemporary paintings and propaganda posters, and material on shell-shock.

This book builds upon critical reevaluations of modernism and British literature of the 1930s with a simultaneous focus on discourses of race, gender, and empire. The essays direct attention to the complications and ambivalence accumulating around the meanings of Englishness. They reject analyses of texts as chronicles of personal psychological development in favor of analyses that assume texts are shaped by their authors' public intellectual involvement. In addition, they offer detailed, specific explorations of ways in which British women in the 1930s narrativize empire and war. Thus they will resonate with significance for readers in the early twenty-first century for whom empire and war, as well as terror and security, are part of the discourse of everyday life. Robin Hackett is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. Freda S. Hauser is an independent scholar. Gay Wachman is retired from the State University of New York-Old Westbury.

This book helps readers understand the extent to which shell shock continues to shape modern memories of the First World War.