Santanu Das, Kate McLoughlin. The First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xi + 268 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-726626-7.
Reviewed by Susan McCready (University of South Alabama)
Published on H-War (March, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
The eleven essays in this volume were adapted from papers delivered at the 2014 British Academy conference "The First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity." The volume hangs together much better than most "proceedings" volumes and contributes to the outpouring of excellent work about the war occasioned in part by the recently concluded centennial commemorations. Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin's introduction situates the volume within the field of First World War studies and points to the interdisciplinary richness that has characterized scholarship of the Great War for at least the past thirty years. While the volume is essentially literary, aiming to address "how literature, culture, and the Frist World War coalesce in a putative modernity" (p. 4), the editors have grouped the contributions around three principles: the philosophical, the representational, and the political. "Conventionally understood as a crisis in representation," they argue, "the war, in this volume is cast in the different light of epistemology, as a failure in knowing rather than in writing" (p. 10).
In the first part of the volume, entitled, "Unfathomable," essays by McLoughlin, Hope Wolf, and Vincent Sherry address what the editors consider the philosophical questions of speaking and silence, the limits of language, and the meaning of sacrifice. McLoughlin reads the veteran experience through Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" (1936) and concludes that the uncommunicative war veterans in the texts she studies are "at odds with modernity" (p. 54), refusing "the domination of enlightenment" (p. 55). Wolf's essay focuses entirely on David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937), which she reads as a work about the breakdown of language and the need to recalibrate it as an instrument of memory. Vincent Sherry's wide-ranging essay relies on literary texts, political discourse, and posters to argue that "the figure of the sacrificial offering appears and reappears to consecrate [the] otherwise uncertain purpose [of the war]" (p. 74).
"Scoping the War" is the second part of volume, which consists of essays by Sarah Cole, Laura Marcus, Christine Froula, and Mark Rawlinson that the editors have grouped together because of their focus on representation. Cole's essay treats texts by noncombatant authors (H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and Mary Borden) and demonstrates their claim to a shared war experience with veterans, even if imagined from a distance. Marcus explores how several films of the First World War "gave rise to an imaginary shaped by images of the departed" (p. 127). Froula's contribution returns once again largely to Virginia Woolf, although touching on a variety of other sources, in an examination of the ways in which aerial bombing affected British civilians. Rawlinson's essay, which I think is the best in the volume, addresses the problem of dissent in war literature. Through powerful readings of Wyndham Lewis and Henry Williamson, he demonstrates that "our faith in war literature as a cultural protest against war is in tension with the facility with which war writing can be mobilized to frame or validate military violence" (p. 154).
The last group of essays "'Cosmopolitan Sympathies'?" takes its title from Isaac Rosenberg's 1916 poem, "Break of Day in the Trenches," and includes chapters by Jahan Ramazani, Margaret Higonnet, Claire Buck, and Das. This section of the book is political in focus, examining both nationalism and various encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans occasioned by the war. In his essay, Ramazani analyzes how poems by combatants and noncombatants deploy language and form to "perform and vivify the global" (p. 195). Higgonet examines the work of a "universal sisterhood" (p. 197) of central and eastern European antiwar women artists, focusing especially on Käthe Kollwitz, whose work called on women, especially mothers, to resist the lure of war. Buck considers encounters between colonial subjects and women in the work of Mary Borden and Enid Bagnold. She argues that their "racial thinking is richly diagnostic of the uneven and asymmetrical intersections between modernity, war, and cosmopolitanism (p. 239). Das's contribution closes the volume by examining the war experience of some of the four million nonwhite men mobilized in the war effort, men whom he calls "joint conscripts of modernity and empire" (p. 241). He concludes with an analysis of Rabindranath Tagore's postwar rhetoric that brought together the concepts of war and empire. Das demonstrates that Tagore's critique laid the foundation for Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon.
All eleven essays and the introduction are well written and deploy a variety of approaches to the vast topic proposed in the volume's title; each essay, moreover, demonstrates a thorough knowledge of its particular subfield. The volume itself is handsome and, unlike many essay collections, includes an index. The authors and editors deserve praise for selecting essays that expand on the cannon of war literature beyond the well-known combatant-poets and for moving beyond the literary to include film and the plastic arts. My only quibble is that the volume remains heavily, somewhat disappointingly, Anglocentric, and poetry focused. Still, there is a great deal of merit in this very fine contribution to the field of First World War literary studies.
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Citation:
Susan McCready. Review of Das, Santanu; McLoughlin, Kate, The First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53977
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