The Literature of War

Worldview ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 14-22
Author(s):  
Mark Taylor
Keyword(s):  
The Waste Land ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
War Novels ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Imaginative Literature ◽  
Farewell To Arms ◽  
Good Soldier ◽  
First World

The literature of the First World War, to begin with that one, illustrates a tragic paradox: The most destructive of human enterprises can nourish the most creative. Probably no single event in history allowed the transformation of so many intense personal experiences—often presented for outspokenly didactic reasons or as cries of impotent frustration or as necessary therapy—into works of art that transcended the limited circumstances of their birth. No responsible account of this century's imaginative literature could omit Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, William Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay and A Fable, Emest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, William March's Company K, Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier: Schweik, Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grisha, or the lyric poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Charles Hamilton Sorley. To this list might be added such seminal works of modernism as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. These are not “war poems” or “war novels,“ in any narrow sense, but they clearly would not exist had there been no war.

Dadaism and Classicism in The Waste Land

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-292
Author(s):  
Patrick Eichholz
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Central Question ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Full Account ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Out of the wreckage of the First World War, classicism and dadaism charted two opposing paths forward. While one movement sought to overturn the institutions complicit in prolonging the war, the other sought to buttress these same institutions as a safeguard against the chaos of modern life. This essay studies the peculiar convergence of these contradictory movements in The Waste Land. The article provides a full account of Eliot’s postwar engagement with dadaism and classicism before examining the influence of each movement on The Waste Land. Walter Benjamin’s theory of baroque allegory will be introduced in the end to address the article’s central question: How can any one poem be both classicist and dadaist at the same time?

“To Begin on Again”: A Study of Early Cinema’s Unique Influence on Modernist Literature

Film Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-81
Author(s):  
Maria Mutka
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
First World War ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

This article examines the intersectionality of modernist literature and the advent of cinema, particularly in the context of the incomparable tragedies of the First World War in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Avant-garde writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot utilized cinema-inspired techniques in some of their most famous literary works, including Ulysses and “The Waste Land.” These techniques are especially salient in light of how much both the First World War and cinema altered societal notions of time, space, and motion.

Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
David James ◽  
Urmila Seshagiri
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Wassily Kandinsky ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Formal Innovation ◽  
First World

The task for contemporary literature is to deal with the legacy of modernism.—Tom McCarthy (2010)A century separates us from an iconic moment of aesthetic metamorphosis: 1914 witnessed the appearance of James Joyce's Dubliners, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, Mina Loy's “Parturition,” and the vorticist journal Blast. It was the year Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, aided by Ezra Pound, started the literary review the Egoist in London and Condé Nast and Frank Crowninshield launched Vanity Fair in New York. Arnold Schoenberg's atonal symphonic works assaulted classical sonorities; Wassily Kandinsky elevated the purity of geometric form above the functional work of visual representation. Most crucially, 1914 saw the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the subsequent outbreak of the First World War. Cutting a bloody, four-year swath across Europe, the war took almost forty million lives and rendered all subsequent formal innovation inseparable from cultural devastation: thus the intricate, ruptured literary architectures of The Waste Land (1922), Ulysses (1922), and To the Lighthouse (1927).

From the Waste Land to the Dark Tower

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-198
Author(s):  
Sam Wiseman
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
World War ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Sylvia Townsend Warner ◽  
Ancient Civilizations ◽  
Daphne Du Maurier ◽  
First World

This chapter explores the evolution of the rural Gothic following the First World War, noting how the legacy of the conflict is evident in an emphasis, for example, upon violence and trauma within domestic space (E.F. Benson). For some authors of the period, there is a sense of rebirth following the war, linked to a re-enchantment of the British landscape that contains Gothic elements in its focus upon narratives of pagan sacrifice (Mary Butts, Algernon Blackwood) or witchcraft (Sylvia Townsend Warner). Many of these developments come together in depictions of Cornwall, particularly in the novels of Daphne du Maurier or in D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo, as a space that is simultaneously English and non-English, liminal, and connected to ancient civilizations and mythologies.

The Waste Land (1922)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Templeton
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Verse Forms ◽  
Fleurs Du Mal ◽  
First World

The Waste Land is an influential and experimental 435-line poem written by Thomas Stearns Eliot and first published in 1922. Structurally, it is a pastiche of different verse forms, both traditional and contemporary. The poem is richly allusive and polyvocal. It contains several different languages, as well as allusions to texts as diverse as the Upanishads, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. A pre-publication manuscript of the poem reveals that both Eliot’s first wife Vivienne and his friend Ezra Pound helped revise the poem into its final form before its initial publication in 1922. At its core, The Waste Land is about life in London following the catastrophe of the First World War. The fragmentation of the verse form in The Waste Land mirrors the fragmentation of life in war-torn London and the increasing disorientation of urban experience.

Writing Life: Early Twentieth-Century Autobiographies of the Artist-Hero

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mhairi Pooler
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First World

Writing Life offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and Modernism via the First World War, this study offers a new way of evaluating biographical context and experience in the individual creative process at a critical point in world and literary history. Writing Life is also the story of four literarily and personally interconnected writers – Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson – and how and why they variously adapted the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, or artist narrative, for their autobiographical writing, reimagining themselves as artist-heroes. By appropriating key features of the genre to underpin their autobiographical narratives, Writing Life examines how these writers achieve a form of life-writing that is equally a life story, artist’s manifesto, aesthetic treatise and modern autobiographical Künstlerroman. Pooler argues that by casting their autobiographical selves in this role, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson shift the focus of their life-stories towards art and its production and interpretation, each one conducting a Romantic-style conversation about literature through literature as a means of reconfirming the role of the artist in the face of shifting values and the cataclysm of the Great War.

scholarly journals Hemingway in the Soča vally

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 17-19
Author(s):  
Bruce Mclver
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Farewell To Arms ◽  
First World

Hemingway is a very popular writer in Slovenia. One of my students in Ljubljana pointed out a very well known passage lin A Farewell to Arms about two refugee girls Frederic Henry and his driver, Aymo, pick up in Gorizia (Gorica) during the retreat from Caporetto (Kobarid). What interested many of my students about the episode was that the two girls seem to speak a dialect that neither Aymo, who is Italian, nor Frederic, who is fluent in Italian,' understands. My students belived that these girls are speaking Slovenian. The only Italian they seem to understand are the words in Italian for sexual intercourse, which makes them very upset, and virgin and sister, which calm them down. It is very likely that two Slovenian girls would know a little Italian, particularly if they came from Gorizia, which at the time of the first world war was predominantly Slovene.

scholarly journals A Comparative Analysis of the Themes of ‘War’, ‘Love’, and ‘Illusion’ in Postmodern Age in A Farewell to Arms and Eye of the Needle

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-148
Author(s):  
Huma Ahmad ◽  
Rasib Mahmood ◽  
Huma Saeed
Keyword(s):  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Farewell To Arms ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

The study attempts to explore and analyze the themes of 'love', 'war' and 'illusion' in the two novels written by two different authors. One is A Farewell to Arms (1929) written by Ernest Hemingway and the other is Eye of the Needle (2015) written by Ken Follet. Hemingway way and Follet both are American novelists who are known for their fondness for writing on the theme of war. Hemingway wrote many novels using the backdrop of the First World War whereas Ken Follet's Eye of the Needle is authored in the backdrop of the Second World War. Hemingway is one of the representative of modern age writers, whereas Ken Follet is one the writers of postmodern age. It has been observed that both writers while writing on the theme of war in the chosen novels involve, consciously or unconsciously, two sub-themes of 'love' and 'illusion' in their fiction. The research analyzes that what are the differences and the similarities between these writers’ approach towards the said themes. This paper aims at interpreting these themes in the context of postmodernists' scholarship while comparing and contrasting the treatment, which both writers have given to the themes of war, love, and illusion.

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