Commemorative Modernisms

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).

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: A Culture Surcharged with DeathI. Death in Proximity: Wartime CommemorationsThe Shock of the Dead: Deathbeds, Burial Rites and Cemetery Scenes in Nurses’s NarrativesUncomfortable Propaganda: Edith Wharton’s Wartime WritingsII. Grief at a Distance: Civilian ModernismMansfield Mobilised: Katherine Mansfield, The Great War and Military DiscourseThe Civilian War Novel: H.D.’s Avant-Garde War DeadIII. Modernist Death: Postwar RemembranceModernist Memorials: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield in the Postwar WorldConclusion: Modernism’s GhostsBibliographyIndex

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.