Modern Nostalgia : : Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War / / Robert Hemmings.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2013-2000
• VerfasserIn: Hemmings, Robert,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (168 p.)

GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748633067');This book explores Siegfried Sassoon's writing of the twenties, thirties and forties, demonstrating the connections between trauma and nostalgia in a culture saturated with the anxieties of war.Informed by the texts of Freud, W.H.R. Rivers and other psychological writers of the early twentieth century, as well as contemporary theorists of nostalgia and trauma, this book examines the pathology of nostalgia conveyed in Sassoon's unpublished poems, letters and journals, together with his published work. It situates his ongoing anxiety about 'Englishness', modernity, and his relation to modernist aesthetics, within the context of other literary responses to the legacy of war, and the threat of war's return, by writers including Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves and T. E. Lawrence.Key FeaturesProvides the most thorough, eloquently crafted and focused revisionist study of Siegfried Sassoon to dateSets Sassoon's work in new contexts and offers Sassoon as a case study for new ways of remembering warTaps into current theories of trauma, nostalgia and memoryEstablishes continuities between the literary culture of the First and Second World Wars"

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. The Space Between the Wars -- 2. Rivers, Myers and the Culture of War Neuroses -- 3. Witnessing and Survival: The Challenge of ‘Autognosis’ in the Interwar Years -- 4. Wartime Revisited: Ghosts and Spirits in Sassoon’s Patriotic Verse of the Second World War -- 5. Look Back to ‘Gladness’: Nostalgia and Sassoon’s Personal Poems, 1940–5 -- 6. Narcissism and Autognosis: Sassoon, 1936–42 -- 7. Liminal Moments, Uncanny Spaces: Sassoon’s Autobiography and the Modern Subject -- Conclusion -- Index