Charles Hamilton Sorley's poetic career was cut short when he was killed by a sniper's bullet in the Battle of Loos in 1915. He was 20 years old. Robert Graves called Sorley one of the three important poets killed in World War I. Although Sorley's war-related poems continue to appear in many anthologies, his collected poems have been unavailable for many decades. Sorley's nature poems about the Wiltshire landscape, and his thoughtful poems and letters, engaging him with classical and Biblical texts, Goethe, Ibsen, Jefferies, Masefield, Hardy and other writers, show a young poet of discernment and promise. Sorley's war poems are skeptical of the folly of war and refute the war fever of his era. This annotated edition was prepared to help today's reader navigate the cultural terrain of Britain during World War I. Footnotes include unfamiliar terms, place names, historic references, classical and Biblical allusions. Additional materials include biographical notes, an annotated checklist of critical reception of Sorley's writing, juvenilia, and selected letters.

This book draws on literature, specifically on the writings of selected novelists and poets to widen an existing anti-sport discourse to include hitherto excluded voices from the world of literature. The book commences with a review of exiting pro- and anti-sport discourses and then proceeds to examine, in turn, the written works of five eminent authors, excavating from their writings their anti-sports rhetorics. These writers are Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), Charles Hamilton Sorley, Jerome K. Jerome, John Betjeman and Alan Sillitoe. In its conclusion, the book draws together the broad themes discussed in the preceding chapters. Innovative in its approach to sport and literature and remarkable for its not having been previously explored in any depth, this book will be of interest to readers from both social sciences and humanities backgrounds.

Posthumous Lives explores the shifting significance of public and private efforts to commemorate British soldiers killed in World War I—as well as the less well-remembered casualties of the war, including Voluntary Aid Detachments, nurses, conscientious objectors, civilians, and soldiers executed for desertion or cowardice—and the compelling hold the First World War has had on the British imagination for more than a century. By using the concept of the posthumous life—the attempt to extend the presence of the dead into the lives of the living—Bette London demonstrates how this idea came to shape Britain's First World War memory practices and rituals. London draws on a diverse range of source materials—from sentimental memorabilia books commissioned by bereaved families and canonical works of literature and art by Virginia Woolf, Wilfred Owen, and Sir Edwin Lutyens to centenary memorials and commemorative art installations—to uncover the surprising connections between memorialization practices, war writing, and modernism. Spanning the century from the middle of World War I to its centenary celebrations, Posthumous Lives illuminates, in a deeply moving narrative, how the dead are remembered to meet the shifting needs of the living.