Death, Men, and Modernism: Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf
Death, Men and Modernism argues that the figure of the dead man becomes a locus of attention and a symptom of crisis in British writing of the early to mid-twentieth century. While Victorian writers used dying women to dramatize aesthetic, structural, and historical concerns, modernist novelists turned to the figure of the dying man to exemplify concerns about both masculinity and modernity. This book elaborates a nodal point which links death, masculinity, and modernity long before the...
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Death, Men and Modernism argues that the figure of the dead man becomes a locus of attention and a symptom of crisis in British writing of the early to mid-twentieth century. While Victorian writers used dying women to dramatize aesthetic, structural, and historical concerns, modernist novelists turned to the figure of the dying man to exemplify concerns about both masculinity and modernity. Along with their representations of death, these novelists developed new narrative techniques to make the trauma they depicted palpable. Contrary to modernist genealogies, the emergence of the figure of the dead man in texts as early as Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure suggests that World War I intensified-but did not cause-these anxieties. This book elaborates a nodal point which links death, masculinity, and modernity long before the events of World War I.
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1Ch. 1The Self-Spectre: Haunted Narrative in Jude the Obscure25Ch. 2E. M. Forster and the Gender of Dying41Ch. 3Death Watch: Lawrence, Ford, and Freud57Ch. 4After the Party: Woolf, Mansfield, and World War I81Ch. 5Gifts, Goods, and Gods: H. D., Freud, and Trauma103Afterword117Notes121Bibliography141Index149
