Creating a History: The Case for Lawrence as a Civilian War Writer

Abstract

One of the legacies of our last, violent century is how our reading of the literature of its formative period, the First World War and the rise of Modernism, is split between history and aesthetics, the “Georgian” war writers on one side and the Modernists on the other. As the “Men of 1914” the Modernists both emerged and were obliterated on the first year of war. Wyndham Lewis recalled how “It was, after all, a new civilisation that I—and a few other people—was making the blueprints for: the...