Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War

In Cedric van Dijck’s wide-ranging and thought-provoking study, the material turn in war studies meets the material turn in modernist scholarship in a productive and altogether compelling collision, building on and advancing existing work in both areas.

Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War will prove useful to scholars of modernism as well as war historians. Even as the larger argument sometimes stresses familiar binaries, this monograph sheds light on fresh and fascinating material in the First World War’s cultural and literary archives. Especially impressive is the author’s ability to reconstruct entire scenes and compelling stories by weaving together biography with cultural history; and borrowing generously from letters, diaries, and cultural archives. The middle chapters assemble to beautiful effect the correspondence and private, unpublished writings of well-studied writers like Forster and Woolf as well as the lesser-known Mirrlees.

Overall, this volume is one of a kind in modernist studies, resulting from Van Dijck’s adept manoeuvering of multilingual archival sources, sensitive and cogent reading of primary texts in different media, prudent scholarship on a diverse range of topics and fields as well as highly lucid and engaging writing, supported by meticulously comprised footnotes rich in both quantity and quality. Each chapter presents substantial insights from thorough research, and yet contains potential for further development into larger and more interconnected inquiries or fields of their own, which contributes to the continued effort to propel modernist studies towards multiple viable and innovative trajectories.

Overall, Van Dijck offers numerous strong arguments in this admirable and thorough study [...] The quarry is cultural history, with literary biography and thing theory methods used in the pursuit. Throughout, his footnotes provide an excellent guide to scholarship, both on the writers covered and the question of war in relation to modernism more broadly. His chapters on Woolf, Mirrlees, and Anand in particular contain much that will benefit Forsterians – as much as the chapter which directly addresses Forster, in fact – and these include their insights into diverse connections of Forster’s such as J.R. Ackerley, Malcolm Darling, and Mohammed El Adl.

A compelling and innovative study of how artefacts – trench helmets, shop-signs, gravestones, wartime leaflets and magazines – become fundamental to reading and writing the ‘greater war’. With acuity and brio, Cedric Van Dijck invokes the writers Apollinaire, Forster, Woolf, Mirrlees and Anand to lure us to the no man’s land where we no longer know where the body of war ends and that of modernism begins.