Front Lines of Modernism - by M Larabee (Hardcover)

About the Book

Shattering terrain and lives, the First World War challenged the representative power of words, maps, and visual art. This book tells the untold story of literary responses, showing how modernist fictional topographies by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and others shaped the meaning of the war and offered reconstructions of self and culture. Restoring their fiction to a context of spaces and places recorded in a wealth of previously neglected archival materials, this innovative study ranges across literature, cartography, geography, and art history to reorient our knowledge of modernism, revealing its promise of healing and redemption.

Book Synopsis

This book shows how British authors used landscape description to shape the meaning of the First World War. Using a broad range of critically neglected archival materials, it reexamines modernist and traditional writing to reveal how various modes of topographical representation allowed authors to construct healing responses to the war.

Review Quotes

"Front Lines of Modernism takes a new look at old texts. Through topography, space, place and modernism, it provides original readings of important early twentieth-century works . . . [and] is an innovative study of literature, cartography and geography that demonstrates the power of modernism to both heal and redeem. Larabee's eloquently written, sophisticated study is a scholarly work of considerable magnitude." - Jane Mattisson, English Studies

"This comparative strategy produces a series of refreshing and innovative readings . . . Larabee's methodology succeeds largely due to his impressive grasp of battlefield conditions during World War I and British military history." - Claire Barber, Modern Fiction Studies

"A suggestive, well researched, highly readable book that offers an interesting insight on the development of British fiction through the intertwining of mapping, a new sense of experiencing and describing reality, and the trauma of the Great War" - Juan Herrero-Senés, Studies in the Novel

"Insightful and visionary . . . Larabee proves his claims multiple times over . . . this book condenses a valuable and fascinating intersection of the Great War and the modernist sense of space and place for scholars of history, literature, cultural studies, political science, and beyond" - Darcy Lewis, Joseph Conrad Today

"This is, undoubtedly, an important book. Larabee takes the reader easily through a subtle and sophisticatedargument about maps, mapping and modernism, to present original readings of a range of British fiction and its engagement with the inarticulable experiences of the Great War. It is an elegant and very well-informed example of the 'spatial turn' in contemporary criticism, but it also marks an advance on much of the literary criticism written from this perspective in that it challenges the dominant critical concern with maps and power to focus instead on knowledge and the limits of representation. The ease and lucidity of the writing style will make the book readily intelligible to students and to the general, informed reader." - Professor Robert Hampson FEA, FRSA, Professor of Modern Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

"With the front lines of World War I as ground zero, Mark Larabee's study is an epistemological leap, of considerable magnitude and thought, through topography, space, and place." - Herbert Blau, Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities, University of Washington, USA

About the Author

MARK D. LARABEE is Executive Editor of Joseph Conrad Today, and Assistant Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of English at the U.S. Naval Academy.