What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Public Reason—marks the sizeable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. Identifying it as such, the book ou ... More

What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Public Reason—marks the sizeable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. Identifying it as such, the book outlines the occasion for momentous innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. If modernist writing attempts characteristically to “talk back” to the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this book has recovered the cultural setting of its most substantial—and daring—opportunity. The literature that witnesses this exceptional moment in historical time regains its proper importance as the book retrieves the means of reading it accurately. In this book, the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture combine with abundant visual illustration to provide the framework for groundbreaking engagements with the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. The book relocates the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war and, by restoring the historical content and depth of this literature, reveals its most daunting import.