Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature

Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature
Author: Santanu Das
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 27
Release: 2006-04-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139915657

The First World War ravaged the male body on an unprecedented scale, yet fostered moments of physical intimacy and tenderness among the soldiers in the trenches. Touch, the most elusive and private of the senses, became central to war experience. War writing is haunted by experiences of physical contact: from the muddy realities of the front to the emotional intensity of trench life, to the traumatic obsession with the wounded body in nurses' memoirs. Through extensive archival and historical research, analysing previously unknown letters and diaries alongside literary writings by figures such as Owen and Brittain, Santanu Das recovers the sensuous world of the First World War trenches and hospitals. This original and evocative study alters our understanding of the period as well as of the body at war, and illuminates the perilous intimacy between sense experience, emotion and language as we try to make meaning in times of crisis.

Race, Empire and First World War Writing

Race, Empire and First World War Writing
Author: Santanu Das
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2011-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 052150984X

Drawing upon fresh archival material this book recovers the experience of different ethnic groups during the First World War conflict.

India, Empire, and First World War Culture

India, Empire, and First World War Culture
Author: Santanu Das
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2018-09-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107081580

This is the first cultural and literary history of India and the First World War, with archival research from Europe and South Asia.

Literature and the Great War 1914-1918

Literature and the Great War 1914-1918
Author: Randall Stevenson
Publisher: Oxford Textual Perspectives
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199596441

Literature and the Great War offers a fresh, challenging interpretation of the literature of the period, reappraising the settled assumptions through which war writing has come to be read in recent years.

German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War

German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War
Author: Robert L. Nelson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2011-04-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0521192919

First systematic study of German soldier newspapers as a representation of daily life on the front during the Great War.

The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War

The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War
Author: Santanu Das
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-11-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107470080

The poetry of the First World War remains a singularly popular and powerful body of work. This Companion brings together leading scholars in the field to re-examine First World War poetry in English at the start of the centennial commemoration of the war. It offers historical and critical contexts, fresh readings of the important soldier-poets, and investigations of the war poetry of women and civilians, Georgians and Anglo-American modernists and of poetry from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the former British colonies. The volume explores the range and diversity of this body of work, its rich afterlife and the expanding horizons and reconfiguration of the term 'First World War Poetry'. Complete with a detailed chronology and guide to further reading, the Companion concludes with a conversation with three poets - Michael Longley, Andrew Motion and Jon Stallworthy - about why and how the war and its poetry continue to resonate with us.

Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War

Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War
Author: Ralf Schneider
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 595
Release: 2021-09-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110422557

The First World War has given rise to a multifaceted cultural production like no other historical event. This handbook surveys British literature and film about the war from 1914 until today. The continuing interest in World War I highlights the interdependence of war experience, the imaginative re-creation of that experience in writing, and individual as well as collective memory. In the first part of the handbook, the major genres of war writing and film are addressed, including of course poetry and the novel, but also the short story; furthermore, it is shown how our conception of the Great War is broadened when looked at from the perspective of gender studies and post-colonial criticism. The chapters in the second part present close readings of important contributions to the literary and filmic representation of World War I in Great Britain. All in all, the contributions demonstrate how the opposing forces of focusing and canon-formation on the one hand, and broadening and revision of the canon on the other, have characterised British literature and culture of the First World War.

Great War Modernism

Great War Modernism
Author: Nanette Norris
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2015-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611478049

New Modernist Studies, while reviving and revitalizing modernist studies through lively, scholarly debate about historicity, aesthetics, politics, and genres, is struggling with important questions concerning the delineation that makes discussion fruitful and possible. This volume aims to explore and clarify the position of the so-called ‘core’ of literary modernism in its seminal engagement with the Great War. In studying the years of the Great War, we find ourselves once more studying ‘the giants,’ about whom there is so much more to say, as well as adding hitherto marginalized writers – and a few visual artists – to the canon. The contention here is that these war years were seminal to the development of a distinguishable literary practice which is called ‘modernism,’ but perhaps could be further delineated as ‘Great War modernism,’ a practice whose aesthetic merits can be addressed through formal analysis. This collection of essays offers new insight into canonical British/American/European modernism of the Great War period using the critical tools of contemporary, expansionist modernist studies. By focusing on war, and on the experience of the soldier and of those dealing with issues of war and survival, these studies link the unique forms of expression found in modernism with the fragmented, violent, and traumatic experience of the time.

Indian Army and the First World War

Indian Army and the First World War
Author: Kaushik Roy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2018-06-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199093679

Accustomed to conducting low-intensity warfare before 1914, the Indian Army learnt to engage in high-intensity conventional warfare during the course of World War I, thereby exhibiting a steep learning curve. Being the bulwark of the British Empire in South Asia, the ‘brown warriors’ of the Raj functioned as an imperial fire brigade during the war. Studying the Indian Army as an institution during the war, Kaushik Roy delineates its social, cultural, and organizational aspects to understand its role in the scheme of British imperial projects. Focusing not just on ‘history from above’ but also ‘history from below’, Roy analyses the experiences of common soldiers and not just those of the high command. Moreover, since society, along with the army, was mobilized to provide military and non-military support, this volume sheds light on the repercussions of this mass mobilization on the structure of British rule in South Asia. Using rare archival materials, published autobiographies, and diaries, Roy’s work offers a holistic analysis of the military performance of the Indian Army in major theatres during the war.