War Trauma and English Modernism

This book reads English Modernist literature as testimony to trauma of the First and Second World Wars. Focusing upon T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, it examines the impact of war down to the intimate details of their lives, and their strategies to resist it through literary innovation. Following the Modernist tradition rooted in Baudelaire, Eliot's poetry developed as a reaction to the modernity of industrial civilisation, to that of industrial warfare in the 'Sweeney' poems, 'Gerontion' and The Waste Land. Meanwhile, Lawrence redrafted The Rainbow as a riposte to the First World War then in The First "Women in Love" represented its devastation of Europe, and himself. He spent the last decade of his life both acting out and working through the violence of the war, to suggest an alternative to its impending recurrence. From 'The Hollow Men' to Little Gidding Eliot's poetry reached towards a climax of confrontation and disavowal regarding the cost of the First World War, and its successor. This study shifts between disciplinary boundaries of history, biography, criticism and culture: from the traumatic imprint of historical events upon the artist's act of writing, to the interpretation of this writing by a community which remains unable to articulate the original shock of these events. It draws upon archives in Britain and the USA, and the most recent authorised editions of Lawrence and Eliot's writings, to provide a wealth of new critical interpretations for both students and specialists.