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imagination of modernism in the context of the English war, The Great War and the Language of Modernism restores the historical content and depth of this literature, revealing its most daunting import.

Looks at the origins and impact of World War I, discusses the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet, and analyzes public opinion of the period.

Drawing upon medical journals, newspapers, propaganda, military histories, and other writings of the day, 'Modernism, History and the First World War' reads such writers as Woolf, HD, Ford, Faulkner, Kipling, and Lawrence alongside fiction and memoirs of soldiers and nurses who served in the war. This ground breaking blend of cultural history and close readings shows how modernism after 1914 emerges as a strange but important form of war writing, and was profoundly engaged with its own troubled history.

This book shows how British authors used landscape description to shape the meaning of the First World War. Using a broad range of critically neglected archival materials, it reexamines modernist and traditional writing to reveal how various modes of topographical representation allowed authors to construct healing responses to the war.

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.

A comparative study of European cultural and social history during the First World War.