107 Result(s)
-
Chapter
After-life/After-word: The Culture of Mourning and Mysticism
“I was in a staid London hotel at eleven o’clock in the morning, most prim of all the hours of the day, when a lady, well-dressed and conventional, came through the turning doors, waltzed slowly round the hall...
-
Chapter
Introduction
In a single week in February 1916, nearly 10,000 British visitors flocked to the Brighton Royal Pavilion to view the building’s conversion to a military hospital.1 The visitors were drawn by voyeurism as much as ...
-
Chapter
Coda
The First World War centenary in August 2014 invited us to ask why the war matters. This is the question any writer also asks herself about her subject. There are some obvious answers: 37 million casualties a ...
-
Chapter
Purgatorial Passions: “The Ghost” (aka Wilfred Owen) in Owen’s Poetry
A young man writhes on a humble cot, the darkness lying heavy, smothering him. In his mind’s eye a horse-drawn cart rumbles along a broken road. A heavy object strikes one horse and both bolt. Two figures cata...
-
Chapter
Travel Writing on the Western Front: Masefield, Blunden, Sassoon, and Bagnold
In the 1917 Michelin Guide to the Marne Battle-fields (1914), a photograph of a single grave is set opposite a painting from Senlis town hall on the facing page.1 The grave belongs to Monsieur Odent, Mayor of Sen...
-
Chapter
Map** Alterity on the Home Front: Kipling, Bagnold, and Allatini
Among the most persistent myths of the First World War is that of an unbridgeable gap between the civilian population in Britain and those with direct war experience. Memoirs, narratives, and autobiographical ...
-
Chapter
Introduction
The history of reading and First World War studies are both burgeoning fields of study across the humanities, and, in the centenary years (2014–2018) of the world’s first global conflict, are increasingly enga...
-
Chapter
Reading Behind the Lines: War Artists, War Poets, Reading and Letter Writing, 1917–1919
This chapter focuses on three artists: C. R. W. Nevinson (1889–1946); Eric Henri Kennington (1888–1960) and Charles Sargeant Jagger (1885– 1934). They were roughly the same age and came from a similar professi...
-
Chapter
Towards a Popular Canon: Education, Young Readers and Authorial Identity in Great Britain between the Wars
Defining any literary canon is a complex process, subject to multiple strains of influence. Cultural authorities perpetually identify potential electees, and as such any canon is disputed. Yet conversely its r...
-
Chapter
German Soldier Newspapers and Their Allied Counterparts
In the French, British and especially the German armies, soldier newspapers, created by and for soldiers at or near the front, were a major source of popular reading material.1 After a brief analysis of the produ...
-
Chapter
Reading the Great War: An Examination of Edith Wharton’s Reading and Responses, 1914–1918
This chapter is a case study of a single elite reader’s responses to the four years of total war in Europe between 1914 and 1918. While an investigation such as this has obvious limitations, not least in terms...
-
Chapter
‘Today they read even those who did not read’: Reading in Italy during the First World War
At the beginning of the First World War, Italy was still a relatively young state with many structural problems yet to be tackled, such as the improvement of postal services and public transport, the fight aga...
-
Chapter
F. W. H. Myers: Loss and the Obsessive Study of Survival
The young boy sits on a wooden chair in a sparsely furnished rectory, his mother presiding over him. The boy looks up, bible in hand, and asks his mummy whether bad people go straight to hell. His mother purse...
-
Chapter
A Captive Audience? The Reading Lives of Australian Prisoners of War, 1914–1918
The lived experience of prisoners of war remains one of the least explored realms of First World War history. Despite the unprecedented numbers of captives that the conflict produced, captivity never became pa...
-
Chapter
From Parodist to Proselytizer: Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Vital Message”
This scenario, depicting a brother and sister hiding and suppressing their emotion for fear of antagonizing their alcoholic father, “a man who grew more dangerous in his cups” (186), appears in Arthur Conan Do...
-
Chapter
Mourning, the War, and the “New Mysticism” in May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf
A compact woman stands gazing at the fire in the drawing-room grate, a fixed expression on her face. Her dark brown hair tightly plaited in a coronet gives her a regal composure, although she stands barely fiv...
-
Chapter
“Misty-schism”: The Psychological Roots of Aldous Huxley’s Mystical Modernism
A tall, lanky teenager sits in his room alone, hunched over in darkness, a darkness new to him, a darkness isolating him more than he has ever been isolated before. Slowly, he feels for the keys on a portable ...
-
Chapter
The First World War and the Unhoming of Europe
Anyone familiar with writings on the First World War will be familiar with the tendency to describe the war in geographical terms, whether as fronts, campaigns, or battlefields. The names in this topographical...
-
Chapter
E.M. Forster and the War’s Colonial Aspect
In October 1915, K.E. Royds, a Red Cross Relief worker, sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar and through the Mediterranean to Salonika. Her diary records the African coast, “an unknown world” no more than “a...
-
Chapter
Bringing the War Home: The Imperial War Museum
In an article on Katherine Mansfield, Con Coroneos describes war as “a very complex space … a mental and geographical practice constituted through actual battle sites and cultural and mental space.”1 Coroneos ask...
