The Great War And The Language Of Modernism

Vincent Sherry reopens long unanswered questions regarding the influence of the 1914 war on the verbal experiments of modernist poetry and fiction. He recovers the political discourses of the British campaign, offering new readings of Woolf, Eliot and Pound.

With the expressions "Lost Generation" and "The Men of 1914," the major authors of modernism designated the overwhelming effect the First World War exerted on their era. Literary critics have long employed the same phrases in an attempt to place a radically experimental, specifically modernist writing in its formative, historical setting. What real basis did that Great War provide for the verbal inventiveness of modernist poetry and fiction? Does the literature we bring under this heading respond directly to that provocation, and, if so, what historical memories or revelations can be heard to stir in these words? Vincent Sherry reopens these long unanswered questions by focusing attention on the public culture of the English war. He reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity--the idioms of public reason and civic rationality--marked the sizable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. If modernist writing characteristically attempts to challenge the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this study recovers the historical cultural setting of its most substantial and daring opportunity. And this moment was the occasion for great artistic innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Combining the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture with abundant visual illustration, Vincent Sherry provides the framework for new interpretations of the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. With its relocation of the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war, The Great War and the Language of Modernism restores the historical content and depth of this literature, revealing its most daunting import.

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.

A new edition of Paul Fussell's literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, now a classic text of literary and cultural criticism.

She links, for example, the modernist representation of an unstable self to soldiers' familiarity with corpses, the modernist mistrust for fact to the competing nationalist discourses of August 1914, and the modernist description of buildings as having shaken off the past to a desire to forget the war. Booth argues that the dislocations of war often figure centrally in modernist forms even when the war itself seems peripheral to modernist content.

As a hero of the modernist literary revolution, Ford Madox Ford is a fascinating figure of the early 20th century. Haslam explores continuity and crisis in artistic life during the early 20th century through a study of Ford's work and life.

This book explores the theoretical concerns of recent literary and cultural studies through a reappraisal of three innovative women writers of the modernist period: Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein. In its provocative combination of cultural methodologies, it significantly expands on existing aesthetic cartographies of modernism.

This is the first systematic study to trace the way representations of 'Germanness' in modernist British literature from 1890 to 1950 contributed to the development of English identity. Petra Rau examines the shift in attitudes towards Germany and Germans, from suspicious competitiveness in the late Victorian period to the aggressive hostility of the First World War and the curious inconsistencies of the 1930s and 1940s. These shifts were no simple response to political change but the result of an anxious negotiation of modernity in which specific aspects of Englishness were projected onto representations of Germans and Germany in English literature and culture. While this incisive argument clarifies and deepens our understanding of cultural and national politics in the first half of the twentieth century, it also complicates current debates surrounding race and 'otherness' in cultural studies. Authors discussed include major figures such as Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Ford, Forster and Bowen, as well as popular or less familiar writers such as Saki, Graham Greene, and Stevie Smith. Accessibly written and convincingly argued, Rau's study will not only be an important book for scholars but will serve as a valuable guide to undergraduates working in modernism, literary history, and European cultural relations.