Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing [Hardcover]

This book reframes British First World War literature within Britain's history as an imperial nation. Rereading canonical war writers Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, alongside war writing by Enid Bagnold, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, Roly Grimshaw and others, the book makes clear that the Great War was more than a European war.List of illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The First World War and the Unhoming of Europe 2. Travelers on the Western Front: John Masefield, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Enid Bagnold 3. War's Colonial Aspect: Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster 4. Mapping Alterity Between Home and War Fronts: Rudyard Kipling, Enid Bagnold, and Rose Allatini 5. Bringing the War Home: The Imperial War Museum Coda Notes Bibliography Index

A number of suggestive illustrations and photographs from periodicals, primarily the Illustrated London News, and from the Imperial War Museum in its early days are also included. & This will be a significant contribution to the field, impressive not only for the attention paid to underexplored sources, but also for the far-reaching implications of considering strangeness as a way of reconceptualizing our perceptions of the home front and the war zones. (Emma Liggins, Women's Writing, September, 2016)

Bucks book begins with the commonsensical position that most English WW I writing has focused on the English perspective on the Western front or the home front, and in so doing has offered a narrow perspective that elides the wars global dimension. & Summing Up: Recommended. & Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. (G. Grieve-Carlson, Choice, Vol. 53 (6), February, 2016)

In Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing, Claire Buck finds that how wartime and postwar writers saw Britain as an imperial nation determined in large part how they thought of World War I. & The author therefore offers us a valuable and often neglelcä