Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The Great War in British literary culture
- 1 British war memoirs
- 2 The British novel and the war
- 3 The Great War, history, and the English lyric
- 4 British women’s writing of the Great War
- 5 The Great War and literary modernism in England
- Part II The world war: Pan-European views, transatlantic prospects
- Part III Postwar engagements
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
- Series List
5 - The Great War and literary modernism in England
from Part I - The Great War in British literary culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The Great War in British literary culture
- 1 British war memoirs
- 2 The British novel and the war
- 3 The Great War, history, and the English lyric
- 4 British women’s writing of the Great War
- 5 The Great War and literary modernism in England
- Part II The world war: Pan-European views, transatlantic prospects
- Part III Postwar engagements
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
- Series List
Summary
A consensus understanding continues to represent the Great War of 1914-18 as the signal event of artistic modernism. In this account, the war stands as a watershed episode: it draws a line through time, dividing the nineteenth from the twentieth centuries; thus it provides the shaping occasion for artists who take novelty, invention, and precedent-dismaying energy as their establishing aim and motive. The readiness of this connection does not discredit it. Global in scope, shattering in its impact on national traditions as well as class structures and gender identities, this first world war scored a profound disruption into prevailing standards of value and so opened the space in cultural time in which radical artistic experimentation would be fostered. Yet the self-evident element in this reckoning has allowed literary historians to be content with the generalized formulation, taken at somewhat distant retrospect. The relative dearth of work in a historically informed understanding of the “modernist war” has been furthered by the fact that much of this modernist writing came out of a civilian circumstance, whereas readers' attention has been drawn understandably to the dramas attending the production of combat narratives (novels and memoirs) and trench poetry. No less compelling, however, are the conditions impinging on the modernist literature of the war.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War , pp. 113 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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