Commemorative Modernisms - by Alice Kelly

About the Book

This book provides the first sustained study of women's literary representations of death and the culture of war commemoration that underlies British and American literary modernism.

Book Synopsis

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 periodOffers 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.

From the Back Cover

Reconsiders the relationship between the Great War and modernism through women's literary representations of death 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. Alice Kelly is a literary and cultural critic based at the University of Oxford.

Review Quotes

A revealing and poignant treatment of women's writing in an age of public grief. Ranging from nurse-memoirists' initial efforts to uphold the decencies of customary rites to civilian modernists' growing scepticism about the habits and conventions of mourning, Commemorative Modernisms testifies eloquently throughout to the depth and power of writers' concerns with the Great War dead.-- "Marina Mackay, University of Oxford"

Alice Kelly's absorbing and original study [...] Commemorative Modernisms, which engages with a wide range of written responses to the First World War, will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand how the horrors of so many war-dead engendered modernist experimentation in literature, exposing how modernism, war, and memorial culture are, in fact, inevitably intertwined.--Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton "Woolf Studies Annual"

Alice Kelly's exploration of the effect on women's narratives of death, mourning and memorialisation during and after World War One is an interdisciplinary success story.--Elizabeth Wright, Bath Spa University "Literature & History"

I learned so much from this book, and would recommend it to anyone seeking a different perspective on the First World War and its representation in literature and culture. Alice Kelly writes in a direct, unpretentious style, supported by documentary sources and copious illustrations. It is an admirable achievement of scholarship and criticism that may well change the way we think about the "war to end all wars."--Rob Spence "Shiny New Books"

In this careful and scholarly volume ... Kelly shows how both during and after the war women writers searched for new modes of expression and pursued themes of fragmentation, obliteration and the intrusion of the monstrous and unpredictable into private lives ... Kelly's book makes for uncanny reading today, in another time off dark, empty streets, the bodies of loved ones we cannot touch, and the daily registers of a heavy death toll.--Sarah Lonsdale "TLS"

In this intelligent and sensitive study, Alice Kelly explores how women writers mapped the literary landscape of modernism in the disordered years during and after the Great War. By probing their creative responses to the slaughter of the war years and the commemorative wave that followed it, Kelly provides a new and gendered reading of the modernist achievement.-- "Jay Winter, Yale University"

Kelly provides a new way of considering the works under discussion as they are brought together in the context of commemoration. The range of authors and genres deepens the conversation around war writing, modernism and commemoration and demands that we reconsider established paradigms.-- "Carol Acton, University of Waterloo"

Kelly provides needed historical and cultural insight into an underdeveloped facet of the war. [...] Each chapter provides new insights into the war writings of the individual authors, and the whole provides a context and a critical paradigm for further exploration of women writers and the First World War. Summing Up: Highly recommended.--W. T. Martin, Huntington University "CHOICE"

Kelly's monograph is an articulate, well-researched, and amply-evidenced study that combines history, material culture, and brilliant close-readings to trace the ways through which women writers reclaimed the realm of World War I and its dead from masculine, combatants' experience.[...] Commemorative Modernisms points to a new direction in the humanities.--Iro Filippaki, Johns Hopkins University "The Modernist Review"

This passionate and compassionate study is at once an excavation of women's war experiences; of how war and modernist writing was shaped by the dead and in turn shaped it; and, of why and how we care for the dead. The intricate scholarship and emotional nuance with which Kelly illuminates and integrates these different histories are remarkable.-- "Santanu Das, University of Oxford"

What makes Commemorative Modernisms so compelling, and so vital in the context of contemporary debates around the politics of death and remembrance, is the way it reminds us that the First World War, too, unfolded 'one human being at a time'. Remembering this fact is a powerful rejoinder to nationalistic hijacking of mourning and commemorative practices.--Lizzie Hibbert "Review 31"

About the Author

Alice Kelly is the Harmsworth Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her critical edition of Edith Wharton's First World War reportage, Fighting France was published by EUP in December 2015 and she co-edited a Special Issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies on 'Katherine Mansfield and the First World War' (EUP, September 2014).