Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War - Hardcover

Booth, Allyson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195102118 ISBN 13: 9780195102116

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1996

Synopsis

The unprecedented magnitude of death during World War I forever altered how people perceived their world and how they represented those perceptions. In Postcards from the Trenches, Allyson Booth traces the complex relationship between British Great War culture and modernist writings. She shows that, through the experience of the Great War, both civilian and combatant modernist writers found that language could no longer represent experience. She goes on to identify and contextualize several of the resulting modernist tropes: she links the dissolving modernist self to soldiers' familiarity with corpses, the modernist mistrust of factuality to the apparent inaccessibility of facts regarding the "rape of Belgium," and the modernist interest in multiple viewpoints to the singularity of perspective with which generals studied battlefield maps. Though her emphasis is on literary works by Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, and Vera Brittain, among others, Booth's analysis extends to memorials, posters, and architecture of the Great War. This interdisciplinary quality of Booth's study results in a much deeper understanding of how the Great War affected cultural representations and how that culture represented the War.

About this title

About the Author

Allyson Booth is Associate Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy.

From the Back Cover

In Postcards from the Trenches, Allyson Booth traces the complex relationship between British Great War culture and modernist literature and architecture. By drawing on a wide range of materials and attending to the places where they overlap, Booth uncovers ways in which modernism is deeply embedded in a broader Great War culture. She links, for example, the modernist representation of an unstable self to soldiers' familiarity with corpses, the modernist mistrust for fact to the competing nationalist discourses of August 1914, and the modernist description of buildings as having shaken off the past to a desire to forget the war. Booth argues that the dislocations of war often figure centrally in modernist forms even when the war itself seems peripheral to modernist content. Thus she suggests that soldiers experienced the Great War as strangely modernist and that modernism itself is strangely haunted by the Great War.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195102118
• ISBN 13: 9780195102116
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200