Shell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I

This book helps readers understand the extent to which shell shock continues to shape modern memories of the First World War.

Trevor Dodman (Author)

9781107114203, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 September 2015

256 pages, 19 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.9 x 2 cm, 0.49 kg

'… a rich and thought-provoking study that is bursting with ideas and insights.' Rachel Murray, The British Society for Literature and Science

Shell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I explores the narrative traces, subaltern faces, and commemorative spaces of shell shock in wartime and postwar novels by Mulk Raj Anand, Ford Madox Ford, Mary A. Ward, George Washington Lee, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Christopher Isherwood. This book argues that World War I novels serve as an untapped source of information about shell shock, and renews our present understanding of the condition by exploring the nexus of shell shock and practices of commemoration. Shell shock novelists testify to the tenaciousness and complexity of the disorder, write survivors into visibility, and articulate the immediacy of wounds that remain to be seen. This book helps readers understand more fully the extent to which shell shock continues to shape and trouble modern memories of the First World War.

1. Faces of battle in Mrs Humphry Ward's wartime writing
2. 'Not yet diagnosed nervous': Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End tetralogy
3. No separate peace: A Farewell to Arms as trauma narrative
4. 'Belated impress': River George and African American shell shock
5. Sepoy shell shock, Mulk Raj Anand, and the Indian World War I novel
6. Traumatic topographies in Tender is the Night
Coda. Queer World War I: Isherwood and shell shock sexualities.

Subject Areas: First World War [HBWN], First World War fiction [FJMF], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]