Modernism, History and the First World War

A ground-breaking cultural history of Modernism and the First World War covering well-known fiction and soldiers' memoirs.

Drawing upon medical journals, newspapers, propaganda, military histories, and other writings of the day, Modernism, History and the First World War reads such writers as Woolf, HD, Ford, Faulkner, Kipling, and Lawrence alongside fiction and memoirs of soldiers and nurses who served in the war. This ground-breaking blend of cultural history and close readings shows how modernism after 1914 emerges as a strange but important form of war writing, and was profoundly engaged with its own troubled history.

"Modernism, History and the First World War is an insightful, engaging analysis of the ways in
which literary modernism, although not a product of the war, was nevertheless shaped by it. Drawing on canonical writers such as Virginia Woolf, HD, Ford Madox Ford, and Rudyard Kipling as well as more popular writing from newspapers, memoirs and pamphlets, Trudi Tate provides a nuanced assessment of the ways in which history and fantasy, including the technological innovation of the tank, intersect in the narratives that bore witness to the trauma of the 'war to end all wars'.  It is essential reading for anyone interested in modernist fiction and war writing."

—Jane Potter, Oxford Brookes University. Author of Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's
Literary Responses to the Great War

About the author

Trudi Tate is a Fellow of Clare Hall and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English, Cambridge, where she teaches Victorian, modernist, and contemporary literature. Her books include Women, Men and the Great War (ed. 1995), Women’s Fiction and the Great War (1997; ed. with Suzanne Raitt), Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer (2003; ed. with Helen Small); The Listening Watch: Memories of Viet Nam (2013); and A Short History of the Crimean War (2014).