Description
Book SynopsisNew 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.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
