World War I and the Cultures of Modernity - Paperback

by Douglas Mackaman (Editor), Michael Mays (Editor), Sandra M. Gilbert (Preface by)

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

Front Jacket

A revisionist study that rejects the time-honored argument that the Great War was the cataclysmic break with the epoch that preceded it

Author Biography

Douglas Mackaman is associate professor of history and director of French area studies at the University of Southern Mississippi and author of Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France. Michael Mays is associate professor of English as well as cofounder and codirector of the Institute for the Study of Modern Life at the University of Southern Mississippi.