Introduction

Summary

This book explores the modernist fascination with the material culture of the First World War – a focus that may seem counter-intuitive at first. Modernist authors were famously captivated by the ways the conflict unravelled the mind, recruiting experimental forms to capture this undoing in writing. At the same time, their texts were packed with monuments, gravestones, helmets, uniforms, shells, military signs, mud, war debris and shrapnel. The First World War had even prompted a way of thinking of these texts as objects in their own right, from books handprinted at the front to tattered letters and censored newspaper pages all uniquely shaped by the ongoing hostilities. What meanings convened around these objects and around these texts as objects? This book tells the story of that two-pronged question. It argues that modernist encounters with the things of war – equipment, museum pieces, souvenirs, paraphernalia, commodities, curiosities – served as a way to make sense of an extraordinary historical moment.

Each chapter centres around this dual question. The five authors featured in this study are Guillaume Apollinaire, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and Mulk Raj Anand. In the years between 1914 and 1941, these writers represented and repurposed a great number of objects from the war world. Engagement with these objects figured as a response to some of the First World War's emblematic experiences. For instance, Guillaume Apollinaire's dispatches from the front, in which the French poet humorously reinvented the use of the Adrian helmet as a shopping basket, read as an attempt to grapple with the precarity of life in the trenches. These dispatches appeared in trench publications that were peculiar material records of their wartime surroundings: printed in the war zone on poor-quality paper, affected by paper shortages and censorship, stained, annotated by hand or wrapped in pages from army newspapers. Apollinaire's modernist texts, then, reflected on the war through staging visceral encounters with the material culture of conflict, and were themselves encountered as such affectively charged objects, with their physical contours serving as unique witnesses to the poet's precarious existence at the front. The chapters that follow will turn to other writers and other things: Forster's shop signs, Woolf's monuments, Mirrlees's gravestones and Anand's mud-stained bodies.