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imagination of modernism in the context of the English war, The Great War and the Language of Modernism restores the historical content and depth of this literature, revealing its most daunting import.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Named "One of the 100 best books ever published in Canada" (The Literary Review of Canada), Rites of Spring is a brilliant and captivating work of cultural history from the internationally acclaimed scholar and writer Modris Eksteins. Dazzling in its originality, witty and perceptive in unearthing patterns of behavior that history has erased, Rites of Spring probes the origins, the impact and the aftermath of World War I--from the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913 to the death of Hitler in 1945. "The Great War," Eksteins writes, "was the psychological turning point...for modernism as a whole. The urge to create and the urge to destroy had changed places." In this extraordinary book, Eksteins goes on to chart the seismic shifts in human consciousness brought about by this great cataclysm through the lives and words of ordinary people, works of literature, and such events as Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and the publication of the first modern bestseller, All Quiet on the Western Front. Rites of Spring is a remarkable and rare work, a cultural history that redefines the way we look at our past and toward our future.