Abstract
This paper looks at the representation of war in fiction as a catastrophic social event. In studying or teaching the Great War as represented in modernist literature, we have to acknowledge that fiction, and despite its overlap with history or historical value, is not mere history. War literature retains a powerful sociological orientation. The novels discussed in this paper push real war action to the background and highlight, instead, the impact of war on the subjective lives of individuals and their social interaction. Modernism is not primarily concerned with accurately reproducing the war, but rather with impressionistic details, i.e. the impact of war on introverted lives. Therefore, the real value of such novels is not documentary or historical but social and psychological.
Highlights
The Great War was arguably the biggest public event in the first half of the twentieth century
Having looked at the representation of the Great War in representative works belonging to the British modernist canon, it is time to examine some selected works from the American modernist tradition and in terms of their social commentary on the Great War and its aftermath
The Great War was a strong presence in modernist novels
Summary
The Great War was arguably the biggest public event in the first half of the twentieth century. The sudden death of Mrs Ramsay signals the death of conventional certainties of an earlier era like family life, optimism, and benevolence Her ghost haunts the deserted house, and the deserted house becomes an objective correlative for the expression of emotions of loss, lament and change brought by the passage of time and war.The deaths of Mrs Ramsay, her son, and her daughter are reported in brackets to indicate their suddenness and insignificance in the larger scheme of things like time and war. Woolf presents a unique feminist vision of the social context of war As a woman, her focus is not war action in itself but the war as felt and experienced at home, especially in the loss of Victorian womanhood ideals represented by Mrs Ramsay as the Angel in the House and death within families. The damage done by the war to men, to the bodies and psyches, as well as the repercussions of this damage on human relations is what is at issue in Lawrence’s text and what gives the war a social context as a critique of modernity
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