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Modernism & World War I Trudi Tate. Modernism, History, and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. vii + 196 pp. Cloth £40.00 Paper £11.99
AT FIRST GLANCE, a critical work examining the connections between literary modernism and the first world war would seem to have little new to say, the territory being fairly well mined in the last few years. However, Trudi Tate's new study of the relationship between modernist fiction, cultural history, and World War I offers fresh and engaging insights into the ways in which the experience of the war and the cultural output of the period interact and are inextricably bound together. Her concern is with the difficulties of bearing witness to an event that was at once profoundly traumatic and only partially seen, and she investigates how both civilians and combatants struggled to make sense of the violence they experienced but only understood "through a fog of ignorance, fear, confusion, and lies." Examining various forms of writing produced during and after the war, Tate revisits the work of modernists such as Woolf, HD, Lawrence, Ford, and Faulker, and places them alongside the war writings of Blunden, Graves, Barbusse, and Remarque. Reading them beside each other, the categories of "modernism" and "war writing" begin to elide, and after the war the fictions of literary modernism begin "to look like a peculiar but significant form of war writing."
Indeed, Tate seems interested in complicating the convenient categories that have become regarded as axiomatic when examining works of the period, whether those categories are "modernist" and "nonmodernist" or "women's writing" and "men's writing," for she argues that "this kind of catergorising obscures more than it illuminates." The emphasis here is on how individuals saw themselves in relation to the historical events they were engulfed in and how the awareness of "total war" impacted ideas of personal autonomy, attitudes toward government, and perceptions of the human body, so vulnerable to the force of modern technology and weaponry. In the period during and just after the war, Tate argues that these concerns far outweigh the more frequently asked questions about gender or aesthetic difference.
Part I of the work examines the difficulty of bearing witness to an event that was deliberately obfuscated by...