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.

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.

The modernist period was an era of world war and violent revolution. Covering a wide range of authors from Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy at the beginning of the period to Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett at the end, this book situates modernism's extraordinary literary achievements in their contexts of historical violence, while surveying the ways in which the relationships between modernism and conflict have been understood by readers and critics over the past fifty years. Ranging from the colonial conflicts of the late 19th century to the world wars and the civil wars in between, and concluding with the institutionalization of modernism in the Cold War, Modernism, War, and Violence provides a starting point for readers who are new to these topics and offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field for a more advanced audience.

This is the first book to consistently read English Modernist literature as testimony to trauma of the First and Second World Wars. Focusing upon T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, it examines the impact of war upon their lives and their strategies to resist it through literary innovation.

World War II marked the beginning of the end of literary modernism in Britain. However, this late period of modernism and its response to the war have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve. In this full-length study of modernism and World War II, Marina MacKay offers historical readings of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, T. S. Eliot, Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh set against the dramatic background of national struggle and transformation. In recovering how these major authors engaged with other texts of their time - political discourses, mass and middlebrow culture - this study reveals how World War II brought to the surface the underlying politics of modernism's aesthetic practices. Through close analyses of the revisions made to modernist thinking after 1939, MacKay establishes the significance of this persistently neglected phase of modern literature as a watershed moment in twentieth-century literary history.

Cole examines the rich history of masculine intimacy in the twentieth century. She foregrounds such crucial themes as broken friendships, blood brotherhood, and the bereavement of the war poet. Cole argues that these dramas of compelling and often tortured male friendship have generated a particular voice within the literary canon.

This book is a collection of essays on neglected aspects of the Great War. It begins by asking what exactly was so "Great" about it, before turning to individual studies of various aspects of the war. These fall broadly into two categories. Firstly personal, micro-narratives that deal directly with the experience of war, often derived from contemporary interest in diaries and oral histories. Presenting both a close-up view of the viscerality, and the tedium and powerlessness of personal situations, these same narratives also address the effects of the war on hitherto under-regarded groups such as children and animals. Secondly, the authors look at the impact of the course of the war on theatres, often left out in reflections on the main European combatants and therefore not part of the regular iconography of the trenches in places such as Denmark, Canada, India, the Levant, Greece and East Africa.

Grouped into 21 thematic sections, this collection provides theoretical introductions to the primary texts provided by the scholars who have taken the lead in pushing both modernism and gender in different directions. It provides an understanding of the complex intersections of gender with an array of social identifications.

This book is a study of the relations between the body and its technologies in modernism. Tim Armstrong traces the links between modernist literary texts and medical, psychological and social theory across a range of writers, including Yeats, Henry James, Eliot, Stein, and Pound. Armstrong shows how modernist texts enact experimental procedures which have their origins in nineteenth-century psychophysics, biology, and bodily reform techniques, but within a context in which the body is reconceived and subjected to new modes of production, representation and commodification. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, Armstrong challenges the received oppositions between technology and literature, the instrumental and the aesthetic, by demonstrating the leaky boundaries and complex interconnections between these domains. This book offers a cultural history of modernism as it negotiated the enduring fact of the human body in a period of rapid technological change.