Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination

Wyatt Bonikowski is Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University, USA.

• Contents: Introduction: shell shock and the traces of war; The invisible wound: shell shock and psychoanalysis; Transports of a wartime impressionism: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End; The ’passion of exile’: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier; ’Death was an attempt to communicate’: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; Conclusions: the ethics and aesthetics of the death drive; Bibliography; Index.

'As Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination progresses, Bonikowski’s arguments gain momentum, coalescing in his powerful point that in the aesthetic sublimation of the death drive, modernist fiction can sustain the pleasures of life.' Times Literary Supplement '... Bonikowski teases out some interesting facets of Septimus, by looking at how he functions within the structure of the text. ... Overall the book is a useful ... addition to readings of Mrs Dalloway.' Virginia Woolf Bulletin 'Wyatt Bonikowski has made a strong argument for modernist narrative as a line of thought that ... must take detours in order to pursue a truth about the First World War that is not simply locatable in a past event or an object to be grasped, but is more like a ’thing’ that evades.' English Literature in Transition 1880-1920