World War I and the Cultures of Modernity

Although many novels and works of history have been published on the calamity that was the First World War, no work until this one has sought to unify current historical and literary interpretations of the 1914-1918 era and its implications of modern life. The essays collected here chart the war and its cultural and literary contours from a variety of new and challenging intellectual vantage points.

Focusing in different essays on America, France, Britain, and Germany, the contributors to this book contest the long-accepted notion about World War I as the crucible of modern life. Instead, their interrogations of the trench experience, home-front conditions, forms of mass culture, and literary genres reveal that the war was as much a moment of cultural opportunity as it was the point of origin for modern society or its cultural forms.

Showing how prudery and decency became patriotic imperatives after 1914, for example, they explore how the war time experience allowed for a cultura