First World War

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 interwarimaginative 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 moreglobal understanding of twentieth-century literature and culture.

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., 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.

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 programmeswith 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-disciplinarynetwork of scholars working on war representation, and co-general editor of Edinburgh Critical Studies in War & Culture.