The First World War

Literature, Culture, Modernity

Edited by Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin

Proceedings of the British Academy

Provides a more expanded and global understanding of First World War literature and culture
Examines the work of notable literary figures such as Owen, Rosenberg, Jones, H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Anna Akhmatova, and Rabindranath Tagore
Covers a range of literary themes such as ideas of silence, sacrifice, the unfathomable, and the divide between the living and the dead
Uses the visual arts, including film, photography, and the fine arts to further explore the cultural history of the First World War

The First World War

Literature, Culture, Modernity

Edited by Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin

Proceedings of the British Academy

Description

The First World War at once extends and marks a departure from established understandings of the literature and culture of the First World War. In a series of compelling readings, scholars who have shaped the field rethink the intersections between war, literature, culture, and modernity across an international range of writers.

Their attention ranges from combatant poets Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, David Jones, and Robert Service to intrepid nurse-memoirists Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden, to civilian intellectuals as diverse as H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Anna Akhmatova, and Rabindranath Tagore. At the same time, there is engagement with the visual arts, including the film The Battle of the Somme, the sculpture, lithographs and woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz and the interwar imaginative engagement with zeppelins. What results is both a daring expansion of the canon and a reframing of the terms of the debate.

Silence, sacrifice, the unfathomable, maximal intensity, proximity and distance, the divide between the living and the dead, the transfiguration of the skies, resistance, empire and cosmopolitanism are some of the themes that emerge in essays that simultaneously illuminate and take us beyond the parenthesis of the war years. The terms 'war writing', 'modernism', and 'modernity' are themselves revisited as the cast of internationally renowned contributors embed the conflict in a broader and more global understanding of twentieth-century literature and culture.

The First World War

Literature, Culture, Modernity

Edited by Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin

Proceedings of the British Academy

List of figures
Notes on contributors
Preface and acknowledgements
Introduction, Santanu Das & Kate McLoughlin
Part One: Unfathomable
1:Three War Veterans Who Don't Tell War Stories, Kate McLoughlin
2:Scaling War: Poetic Calibration and Mythic Measures in David Jones's In Parenthesis , Hope Wolf
3:Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economy of 'Sacrifice' in the Great War, Vincent Sherry
Part Two: Scoping the War
4:Civilians Writing the War: Metaphor, Proximity, Action, Sarah Cole
5:First World War Film and the Face of Death, Laura Marcus
6:The Zeppelin in the Sky of the Mind, Christine Froula
7:Dissent and the Literature of the First World War: Wyndham Lewis and Henry Williamson, Mark Rawlinson
Part Three: 'Cosmopolitan Sympathies'?
8:'Cosmopolitan Sympathies': Poetry of the First Global War, Jahan Ramazani
9:Maternal Cosmopoetics: Käthe Kollwitz and European Women Poets of the First World War, Margaret Higonnet
10:Encountering War, Encountering Others, Claire Buck
11:Entangled Emotions: Race, Encounters and Anti-Colonial Cosmopolitanism, Santanu Das
Index

The First World War

Literature, Culture, Modernity

Edited by Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin

Proceedings of the British Academy

Author Information

Edited by Santanu Das, Reader in English Literature, King's College London, and Kate McLoughlin, Professor of English, University of Oxford

Educated in Kolkata and Cambridge, Santanu Das teaches in the English Department at King's College London. He is the author of the award-winning monograph Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2006) and Indian Troops in Europe, 1914-1918 (2014) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (2006). He has been involved in a number of centennial commemorative projects on the war, from radio and television programmes with the BBC to advising on concerts, exhibitions, and, most recently, dance-theatre.

Kate McLoughlin is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She previously taught at Birkbeck, University of London, and the University of Glasgow. Her publications include CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011) and Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790-2015 (2018). She is the co-founding director of WAR-Net, an international, inter-disciplinary network of scholars working on war representation, and co-general editor of Edinburgh Critical Studies in War & Culture.

Contributors:

Claire Buck, Wheaton College
Sarah Cole, Columbia University
Santanu Das, King's College London
Christine Froula, Northwestern University
Margaret Higonnet, University of Connecticut
Kate McLoughlin, University of Oxford
Laura Marcus, University of Oxford
Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia
Mark Rawlinson, University of Leicester
Vincent Sherry, Washington University of St. Louis
Hope Wolf, University of Sussex

The First World War

Literature, Culture, Modernity

Edited by Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin

Proceedings of the British Academy

Reviews and Awards

"All eleven essays and the introduction are well written and deploy a variety of approaches to the vast topic proposed in the volume's title; each essay, moreover, demonstrates a thorough knowledge of its particular subfield. The volume itself is handsome and, unlike many essay collections, includes an index. The authors and editors deserve praise for selecting essays that expand on the cannon of war literature beyond the well-known combatant-poets and for moving beyond the literary to include film and the plastic arts...There is a great deal of merit in this very fine contribution to the field of First World War literary studies." - Susan McCready, University of South Alabama, H-War

"This is a scholarly book which includes several intriguing black and white photos and artwork. All bibliographic references are included in the copious footnotes on each page, and an index concludes the text. A fascinating study for those interested in uncovering some overlooked aspects of the Great War through the eyes of modernism." - David F. Beer, Roads to the Great War