The Material Lives and Afterlives of World War I

Abstract: Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War argues that the field of modernist studies, with its persistent attention to interior life, has neglected the war's object world. Drawing on a rich archive of literary and cultural artifacts, author Cedric Van Dijck explores the relationship between modernist material culture and the affective demands of grief in the wake of war, demonstrating that modernists from Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster to Hope Mirrlees and Mulk Raj Anand turned to war objects—helmets, casings, monuments, books, even objectified bodies—as tangible sites of mourning and affective connection.