World War I and its aftermath: Reaching for the past and across the Atlantic

This article focuses on the British West Indies beginning with the involvement of African Caribbean soldiers in the Great War. It challenges the enduring myth of the First World War as a predominantly white European conflict. The main part focuses on C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian historian and playwright, following his paradigmatic trajectory from the colony to the ‘mother country’ and his involvement in the protracted transnational process of decolonization after the First Word War. It concentrates on one of his political pamphlets and on his play Toussaint Louverture. The work of the British writer and left-wing political activist Nancy Cunard is also presented as another ‘outsider’ text which can further an ongoing methodological project: the re-integration and cross-fertilization of received knowledge about the war with seemingly outlying knowledge, unorthodox political commitment and challenging aesthetics to produce a richer understanding of this formative period across the Atlantic divide.

Symbolism at war: Charles Ricketts and the politics of the stage

This article considers the effect of World War I on Charles Ricketts’ work for the stage as an avant-garde set and costume designer. It looks at his cosmopolitan designs in the context of European symbolism. The first part of the essay focuses on Ricketts’ symbolist manifesto ‘The art of stage decoration’ (1913). The essay then examines his designs for three Shakespeare plays that toured Le Havre in 1918 to entertain the troops. I argue that, in the aftermath of the war, Rickett’s symbolism became the lens through which he assessed the complex political landscape of the 1920s, and suggest that his stance against realism politicized his practice and explains his interest in Mussolini’s fascism.

Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees: The liminal world of Paris in 1919

Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees is a modernist ‘curiosity’ which remained largely unknown due to the peculiar conditions of its original publication. In recent years, however, it has regained its place within the field of modernist studies due to the efforts of Julia Briggs and Sandeep Parmar. Instead of approaching the poem through established categories of urban representation, such as flânerie, urban phantasmagoria or the urban palimpsest, this article focuses on Paris, then in the midst of the 1919 Peace Conference, as a liminal space and site of Bakhtinian carnival. This framework advances an understanding of the poem as a complete and complex work of art. The article argues that the peculiar structure and formal organization of the poem, and its relation to the reality of Paris in 1919 and beyond, turns the poem into a liminal space of its own, thus doubling the city it speaks of.

Introduction: The First World War and its Aftermath: Literary Networks and Cultural Encounters

This introduction offers a survey of some important critical approaches to the ways in which the First World War and its aftermath have been studied, conceptualized, represented and commemorated. In particular, it notes recent scholarly interest in issues of gender, as well as a focus on widening the geographical range of the conflict beyond a dominant European paradigm. A recurrent theme is the emergence of new types of modernity in the post-war era, and the ways in which literature and the arts do not merely reflect that modernity, but actively shape and constitute it.

Out of the ruins: Knut Hamsun’s ‘idealism’ and the inheritance of World War I

In 1920, the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature for his novel Markens grøde ( Growth of the Soil) (1917). This article explores some of the key contexts for this work, highlighting the author’s own ambitions, the reasons why he sided with Germany during the war, and his generally völkisch perspectives on the Germanic and Nordic. It furthermore analyses the early reception of this World War I novel, and how it was first subjected to a number of positive readings and seen as an example of idealism, before being appropriated by Nazism.