Description: Contesting the binaries that still exist between modernist and First World War writing, this critical group study of D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Richard Aldington offers a fresh perspective on the relationship of modernist biofiction and poetry to the literature of the First World War.
Brief description: Lee M. Jenkins is Professor of English at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (1999), The Language of Caribbean Poetry (2005), and The American Lawrence (2015, paperback edn. 2020). She is the co-editor of three collections, Locations of Literary Modernism (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007), and A History of Modernist Poetry (2015), and the author of many journal articles and book chapters, including a chapter in Bloomsbury's forthcoming Handbook to D.H. Lawrence.
Review Quotes:
"Jenkins successfully 'squares the circle' (139) of the book's central argument, showing that Great War modernism, particularly in its autobiographical and intertextual dimensions, continues to shape literary discourse ... This book offers a valuable reassessment of Great War modernism from the doorsteps of 44 Mecklenburgh Square." --Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
"The impact of the Great War on literary Modernism was catastrophic and enduring. This remarkable study of D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Richard Aldington testifies, at the home-front as in the trenches, to lives and writing shaped indelibly by war-time contingencies" --Chris Ackerley, Emeritus Professor of English and Linguistics, University of Otago, New Zealand "Great War Modernists unites the Mecklenburgh Square novels into a monolithic type of collective artistic activity, presents a new awareness of the Great War shaping modernist aesthetics and life writing, reframes the view of Imagism as a wartime poetic mode, elaborates on biofiction, and explores the interdisciplinary connections to avant-garde art, thereby helping to revisit the cultural memory of the war." --First World War Studies