Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War

Cole examines the rich literary and cultural history of masculine intimacy in the twentieth century.

Sarah Cole (Author)

9780521819237, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 August 2003

308 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2.1 cm, 0.629 kg

'This is a very good book and one, I hope, that will open up further avenues for fruitful thinking and research.' Modern Language Review

Sarah Cole examines the rich literary and cultural history of masculine intimacy in the twentieth century. Cole approaches this complex and neglected topic from many perspectives - as a reflection of the exceptional social power wielded by the institutions that housed and structured male bonds; as a matter of closeted and thwarted homoerotics; as part of the story of the First World War. Cole shows that the terrain of masculine fellowship provides an important context for understanding key literary features of the modernist period. She foregrounds such crucial themes as the over-determined relations between imperial wanderers in Conrad's tales, the broken friendships that permeate Forster's fictions, Lawrence's desperate urge to make culture out of blood brotherhood and the intense bereavement of the war poet. Cole argues that these dramas of compelling and often tortured male friendship have helped to define a particular spirit and voice within the literary canon.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: 1. Argument: the organization of intimacy
2. Definitions and choices: modernism, modernity, literary authority
3. Structure: four sites of masculine bonding
Part I. Victorian Dreams, Modern Realities: Forster's Classical Imagination: 4. Hellenism and the beautiful body: Carpenter, Pater, Symonds
5. The fall of Hellenism: Forster's modern disaffection
6. A Passage to India and the failure of institutions
Part II. Conradian Alienation and Imperial Intimacy: 7. Friendship's dramatic demise: Heart of Darkness and Under Western Eyes
8. From system to solipsism: Lord Jim
9. Homoerotic heroics, domestic discipline: Conrad and Ford's Romance
Part III. 'My Killed Friends are with me where I go': Friendship and Comradeship at War: 10. War discourse: friendship and comradeship
11. The major war poets: intimacy, authority, alienation
12. Post-war articulations: lost friends and the lost generation
Part IV. 'The Violence of the Nightmare': D. H. Lawrence and the Aftermath of War: 13. Bodies of men: the landscape of post-war England, 14. Desire and devastation: male bonds in D. H. Lawrence
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary theory [DSA]