One of the key questions of modern literature was the problem of what to do with the war dead. Through a series of case studies focusing on nurse narratives, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, as well as visual and material culture, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War provides the first sustained study of women’s literary representations of death and the culture of war commemoration that underlie British and American literary modernism. Considering previously neglected writing by women in the war zones and at home, as well as the marginalised writings of well-known modernist authors, and drawing on international archival research, this book demonstrates the intertwining of modernist, war, and memorial culture, and broadens the canon of war writing.
Author Alice Kelly is currently a Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Sussex, and the Communications Officer here at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on twentieth-century literary and cultural history in Britain and America. As well as Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (2020), Alice has published a critical edition of Edith Wharton’s First World War reportage, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (2015), and essays on modernist and First World War literature. She has held Fellowships at Yale University, New York University, and a British Academy Rising Stars Award for her interdisciplinary seminar series Cultures and Commemorations of War.
