Book contents
- Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War
- Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Untimely Deaths and Artful Promise in Henry James’s Post-1890 Writings
- Chapter 2 Reading Henry James in First World Wartime
- Chapter 3 Imaginary Widowhood in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘A Year I Remember – 1918’ and A World of Love
- Chapter 4 Retroactive Judgements in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day
- Chapter 5 Traitors, Treason, and ‘Topsy-Turvy’ Values in Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Summer After the War’ and An Artist of the Floating World
- Chapter 6 Art and Consolation in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
- Index
Introduction
The Cracks in the Vase and the Lies in the Soul
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2024
- Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War
- Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Untimely Deaths and Artful Promise in Henry James’s Post-1890 Writings
- Chapter 2 Reading Henry James in First World Wartime
- Chapter 3 Imaginary Widowhood in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘A Year I Remember – 1918’ and A World of Love
- Chapter 4 Retroactive Judgements in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day
- Chapter 5 Traitors, Treason, and ‘Topsy-Turvy’ Values in Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Summer After the War’ and An Artist of the Floating World
- Chapter 6 Art and Consolation in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
- Index
Summary
This Introduction offers a survey of how criticism to date has conceived of the relationship between mass violence and the creative imagination, arguing that little has been done to destabilise the view that when literary works take the destruction of bodies, minds, and ideals in times of war seriously, they find their structures and surfaces warped. Identifying Jay Winter’s pioneering work in the field of cultural history as running counter to this trend, it positions this study as likewise animated by a belief that the wars of the last century not only sparked aesthetic experiments and the abandonment of traditional imaginative structures; they also impelled forms of creative counterfactual thinking whose aims were reparative, preservatory, and consolatory. The concepts of ‘unlived lives’ and ‘lives unlived’ (which will be used to explore various imaginative modes of resistance to violence, loss, and change) are defined. The book’s aims are situated relative to the ethos of the ‘new modernist studies’ and its place periodisation debate explained. The combination of historical, biographical, and close readings deployed in the six chapters to come are given careful justification – as is the selection of Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as the book’s central writers.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025