A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture

(Paperback)

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Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s, World War I opens like a gap in history, separating one world of beliefs and values from another, and changing not only the map of Europe, but the ways in which men and women imagined reality itself. England after the war was a different place: the arts were different; history was different; sex, society and class were all different. The author records the process of that transformation of the English imagination, from the war's beginning into post-war England with its disillusionment, social fragmentations and the waste land spirit. He draws upon literary texts, newspaper and magazine writings, paintings, music, parliamentary debates, films, personal diaries and letters. The author also wrote "The Auden Generation", "The Edwardian Turn of Mind", "The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry" and "Edwardian Occasions".

Reviews

"It is cultural history of a sweeping order... which can be savoured for its profusion of exhibits as well as for its ambitious thesis... A teeming book full of learning and humanity." -- C. J. Fox Independent "Makes tremendous sense... The wholly coherent effect of Hynes's study is all the more notable for the disintegrated nature of his material... A greatly rewarding study of how culture was dumbfounded." -- Mick Imlah The Times Literary Supplement

Author Bio

Samuel Hynes is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature as Princeton University. Together with his earlier works- The Edwardian Turn of Mind and The Auden Generation- A War Imagined forms an important continuous study of the relationship between literature, the arts and th4e events of history during the first four decades of the twentieth century.