The First World War Literature, Culture, Modernity

Edited by Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin

This volume arose from a British Academy Landmark Conference organized in 2014 and is published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy.

• The book provides a more expanded and global understanding of First World War literature and culture
• Examines the work of notable literary figures such as Owen, Rosenberg, Jones, H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Anna Akhmatova, and Rabindranath Tagore
• Covers a range of literary themes such as ideas of silence, sacrifice, the unfathomable, and the divide between the living and the dead
• Uses the visual arts, including film, photography, and the fine arts to further explore the cultural history of the First World War

For more information visit the publishers website

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Santanu Das & Kate McLoughlin

Part 1: Unfathomable

• Three War Veterans Who Don’t Tell War Stories: Kate McLoughlin, University of Oxford
• Scaling War: Poetic Calibration and Mythic Measures in David Jones’s In Parenthesis: Hope Wolf, University of Sussex
• Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economy of ‘Sacrifice’ in the Great War: Vincent Sherry, Washington University of St. Louis

Part 2: Scoping the War

• Civilians Writing the War: Metaphor, Proximity, Action: Sarah Cole, Columbia University
• First World War Film and the Face of Death: Laura Marcus, University of Oxford
• The Zeppelin in the Sky of the Mind: Christine Froula, Northwestern University
• Dissent and the Literature of the First World War: Wyndham Lewis and Henry Williamson: Mark Rawlinson, University of Leicester

Part 3: ‘Cosmopolitan Sympathies’?

• ‘Cosmopolitan Sympathies’: Poetry of the First Global War: Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia
• Maternal Cosmopoetics: Käthe Kollwitz and European Women Poets of the First World War: Margaret Higonnet, University of Connecticut
• Encountering War, Encountering Others: Claire Buck, Wheaton College
• Entangled Emotions: Race, Encounters and Anti-Colonial Cosmopolitanism: Santanu Das, King’s College London