Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- 5 Edwardians to Georgians
- 6 The avant-garde, bohemia and mainstream culture
- 7 ‘Our London, my London, your London’: the Modernist moment in the metropolis
- 8 Futurism, literature and the market
- 9 Literature and World War I
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
9 - Literature and World War I
from PART TWO - THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- 5 Edwardians to Georgians
- 6 The avant-garde, bohemia and mainstream culture
- 7 ‘Our London, my London, your London’: the Modernist moment in the metropolis
- 8 Futurism, literature and the market
- 9 Literature and World War I
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
HTML view is not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button.
Summary
‘As swimmers into cleanness leaping’: the image in which Rupert Brooke projected the high aims of early autumn 1914 remains vivid in cultural memory, among other reasons, for the profound irony it affords in historical retrospect. To greet the hideous futility of four years of trench warfare as a cleansing pleasance of late summer? The gesture magnetises our attention in the same way that the impact of an accident seems to be caught most powerfully when, looking back, we see an expression of unsuspecting happiness immediately preceding it. Just so, however, the pattern of contrast that Brooke forms might be dismissed as a heuristic, really just a useful fallacy, insofar as it allows us to feel a meaning in history that may not be borne out by the facts. As any detailed account of English political and cultural history will indicate, the years preceding the outbreak of the Great War resist assimilation to that myth of the ‘Golden Summer of 1914’. In The Strange Death of Liberal England,for instance, George Dangerfield proposes that the war, far from shaking the foundations of English society, actually helped to preserve the status quo by diverting the energies of a social revolution being threatened by the workers’ and women’s movements, not to speak of the steadily escalating menace in Ireland. The ‘Golden Summer’ theory may be met with equal scepticism when it is applied to literary history: the decorous measures that Brooke presents in his exemplary instance of Georgian poetics were being countered as a prevailing standard, most notably by an increasingly robust avant-garde –a term that signals a militarisation of culture already under way avant-guerre.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature , pp. 152 - 172Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
References
. The Decline of Modernism, trans. . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
. Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.Google Scholar
, and . ‘Reconceptualizing Vorticism: Women, Modernity, Modernism’. In , ed., Blast: Vorticism 1914–1918. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.Google Scholar
Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism, 1790–1990. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.Google Scholar
. Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Spaces Between Modernism and the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. . Stanford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985.Google Scholar
. The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987.Google Scholar
. Taking it like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets. Manchester University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, N. C.Duke University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
. The Life and the Art: A Study of Conrad’s ‘Under Western Eyes’. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996.Google Scholar
The Novel in England 1900–1950: History and Theory. New York and London: Twayne and Prentice Hall, 1999.Google Scholar
. The Flower of Battle: British Fiction Writers of the First World War. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1995.Google Scholar
. ‘D. H. Lawrence and Futurism/Vorticism’. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 8, 1 (1983).Google Scholar
. ‘Futurism and the English Avant-Garde: the Early Pound between Imagism and Vorticism’. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 6, 1 (1981).Google Scholar
. Modernism, malefriendship, and the First World War. Cambridge University Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. World War I and The American Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.Google Scholar
. Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
. Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.Google Scholar
. Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914. Cambridge University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
. The Fitzrovians: A Portrait of Bohemian Society 1900–55. London: Michael Joseph, 1988.Google Scholar
, ed., The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 2nd edn (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1989).Google Scholar
, ed. ‘Lewis’s Myth of the Artist: From Bohemia to the Underground’. In Volcanic Heaven: Essays on Wyndham Lewis’s Painting and Writing. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1996.Google Scholar
. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.Google Scholar
. Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Religious Experience of the Roman People: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus (1911; New York: Cooper Square, 1971).Google Scholar
, and . No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 11: Sexchanges. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
. ‘Futurism in England: a Bibliography’. Bulletin of Bibliography, 44, 3 (September 1987).Google Scholar
. ‘Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist’. Modernism / Modernity, 7, 3 (2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. Bohemian Versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Basic Books, 1964.Google Scholar
. Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of A Major Genre. University Park Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
. ‘Travellers, Dreamers, and Visitors: Ford and Fantasy’. In and , eds., Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002.Google Scholar
. English Art and Modernism, 1900–1939. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1981.Google Scholar
. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. ‘Modernism in Drama’. In , ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
. ‘The Angel of Freedom: Dora Marsden and the Transformation of The Freewoman into The Egoist’. Women’s History Review, 11, 4 (2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Lyric and Narrative Form. Princeton University Press, 1964.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and , eds. The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction. Oxford University Press, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and , eds. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
. Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel 1880–1914. Cambridge University Press, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. The Dawn of Bohemianism: The Barbu Rebellion and Primitivism in Neoclassical France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
, censors the practice of pseudo-logic in ‘T. S. Eliot: the Pseudo-Believer’, in Men without Art (London: Cassell, 1934).Google Scholar
. ‘Militant Discourse, Strange Bedfellows: Suffragettes and Vorticists before the War’. Differences, 4, 2 (1992).Google Scholar
‘Missing the Boat: the Failures of Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop’. The Antigonish Review (Spring-Summer 1990).Google Scholar
. ‘Make it Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism’. In and , eds., Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.Google Scholar
. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.Google Scholar
. ‘Marketing British Modernism: The Egoist and Counter-Public Spheres’. Twentieth-Century Literature, 43, 4 (Winter 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar
. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.Google Scholar
. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
. English Fiction and Drama of the Great War, 1918–39. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War. London: Routledge, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy. Syracuse University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. University of Chicago Press, 1986.Google Scholar
. War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
, Personae: Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (1926), rev. edn, ed. and (New York: New Directions, 1990).Google Scholar
, and , eds. Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909–1914. London: Faber & Faber, 1984.Google Scholar
. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
. Modern Art in Britain 1910–1914. London: Merrell Holbertson in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1997.Google Scholar
A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae (1926). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.Google Scholar
. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. 2 vols. Vol. 1: The World Before the War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
. Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.Google Scholar
. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War. Manchester University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
. From Gautier to Eliot: The Influence of France on English Literature, 1851-1939. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1960.Google Scholar
. H. D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 1913–1946: Talking Women. Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
. The Critic’s Alchemy: A Study of the Introduction of French Symbolism into England. New York: Twayne, 1953.Google Scholar
. Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
The Impact of Modernism 1900–1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Edwardian England. London: Routledge, 1988.Google Scholar
. The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
. Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject. Cambridge University Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ezra Pound in London and Paris. University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
, How We Went into the War: A Study of Liberal Idealism (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1918), esp. ‘The Holy War’.Google Scholar
. Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. New York Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931.Google Scholar
. The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal, 1908–1920. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.Google Scholar
. ‘Out of the Past: Fashion/Orientalism/The Body’. In Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
You have
Access