The Great War and literary modernism in England

A consensus understanding continues to represent the Great War of 1914-18 as the signal event of artistic modernism. In this account, the war stands as a watershed episode: it draws a line through time, dividing the nineteenth from the twentieth centuries; thus it provides the shaping occasion for artists who take novelty, invention, and precedent-dismaying energy as their establishing aim and motive. The readiness of this connection does not discredit it. Global in scope, shattering in its impact on national traditions as well as class structures and gender identities, this first world war scored a profound disruption into prevailing standards of value and so opened the space in cultural time in which radical artistic experimentation would be fostered. Yet the self-evident element in this reckoning has allowed literary historians to be content with the generalized formulation, taken at somewhat distant retrospect. The relative dearth of work in a historically informed understanding of the “modernist war” has been furthered by the fact that much of this modernist writing came out of a civilian circumstance, whereas readers' attention has been drawn understandably to the dramas attending the production of combat narratives (novels and memoirs) and trench poetry. No less compelling, however, are the conditions impinging on the modernist literature of the war.