Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Claire Buck

   Pages 1-7

3. The First World War and the Unhoming of Europe

   • Claire Buck

   Pages 8-44

4. Travel Writing on the Western Front: Masefield, Blunden, Sassoon, and Bagnold

   • Claire Buck

   Pages 45-80

5. E.M. Forster and the War’s Colonial Aspect

   • Claire Buck

   Pages 81-116

6. Mapping Alterity on the Home Front: Kipling, Bagnold, and Allatini

   • Claire Buck

   Pages 117-152

7. Bringing the War Home: The Imperial War Museum

   • Claire Buck

   Pages 153-189

8. Coda

   • Claire Buck

   Pages 190-193

9. Back Matter

   Pages 194-249

   PDF

This book reframes British First World War literature within Britain's history as an imperial nation. Rereading canonical war writers Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, alongside war writing by Enid Bagnold, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, Roly Grimshaw and others, the book makes clear that the Great War was more than a European war.

• World War I
• Great War
• First World War
• imperialism
• colonies
• Modernism
• war writing
• war workers
• English literature
• Europe
• Great Britain
• history of literature
• Rudyard Kipling
• British and Irish Literature

“A number of suggestive illustrations and photographs from periodicals, primarily the Illustrated London News, and from the Imperial War Museum in its early days are also included. … This will be a significant contribution to the field, impressive not only for the attention paid to underexplored sources, but also for the far-reaching implications of considering strangeness as a way of reconceptualizing our perceptions of the home front and the war zones.” (Emma Liggins, Women's Writing, September, 2016)

“Buck’s book begins with the commonsensical position that most English WW I writing has focused on the English perspective on the Western front or the home front, and in so doing has offered a narrow perspective that elides the war’s global dimension. … Summing Up: Recommended. … Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.” (G. Grieve-Carlson, Choice, Vol. 53 (6), February, 2016)

“In Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing, Claire Buck finds that how wartime and postwar writers saw Britain as an imperial nation determined in large part how they thought of World War I. … The author therefore offers us a valuable and often neglected perspective, which is worthy of consideration in a class about World War I or when writing about that massive conflict.” (Stephen E. Tabachnick, English Literature in Transition, Vol. 59 (1), January, 2016)

• Wheaton College, USA

  Claire Buck

Claire Buck teaches English at Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, USA. She is the author of H.D. and Freud: Bisexuality and a Feminine Discourse (1991) and editor of The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature (1992), as well as numerous articles on Modernism, women's war poetry, and the First World War.

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