Description:
What did modernist writers make of the things of war? Often studied for its fascination with the shell-shocked mind, modernist literature is also packed with more tangible traces of the First World War, from helmets, trench art and tombstones to shop signs, military newspapers and leaflets dropped from airplanes. Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War asks what experimental writers read into these objects and how the conflict prompted a way of thinking of their writings as objects in their own right. Ranging from 1914 to the early 1940s, the chapters in this book weave together prose and poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and Mulk Raj Anand.
Brief description: Cedric Van Dijck is a postdoctoral fellow in English Literature at the University of Brussels (VUB). He is a co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals (2023) and The Intellectual Response to the First World War (2017). His research on modernism and war has appeared in PMLA, TSLL, Modernism/modernity, Times Literary Supplement and Modernist Cultures.
Review Quotes: In Cedric van Dijck's wide-ranging and thought-provoking study, the material turn in war studies meets the material turn in modernist scholarship in a productive and altogether compelling collision, building on and advancing existing work in both areas.--Ann-Marie Einhaus, Northumbria University "First World War Studies"