Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War

Reconsiders the relationship between the Great War and modernism through women’s literary representations of death

Provides the first sustained study of death and commemoration in women’s literature in the wartime and postwar period Offers a reconsideration of the relationship between the First World War and literary modernism through the lens of women’s writing
Considers the literary impact of the vast mortality of the First World War and the culture of war commemoration on British and American women’s writing

One of the key questions of modern literature was the problem of what to do with the war dead. Through a series of case studies focusing on nurse narratives, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, as well as visual and material culture, this book provides the first sustained study of women’s literary representations of death and the culture of war commemoration that underlie British and American literary modernism. Considering previously neglected writing by women in the war zones and at home, as well as the marginalised writings of well-known modernist authors, and drawing on international archival research, this book demonstrates the intertwining of modernist, war, and memorial culture, and broadens the canon of war writing.