Isabelle Brasme – författare

Writers at War addresses the most immediate representations of the First World War in the prose of Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, Siegfried Sassoon and Mary Borden; it interrogates the various ways in which these writers contended with conveying their war experience from the temporal and spatial proximity of the warzone and investigates the multifarious impact of the war on the (re)development of their aesthetics. It also interrogates to what extent these texts aligned with or challenged existing social, cultural, philosophical and aesthetic norms.

While this book is concerned with literary technique, the rich existing scholarship on questions of gender, trauma and cultural studies on World War I literature serves as a foundation. This book does not oppose these perspectives but offers a complementary approach based on close critical reading. The distinctiveness of this study stems from its focus on the question of representation and form and on the specific role of the war in the four authors’ literary careers. This is the first scholarly work concerned exclusively with theorising prose written from the immediacy of the war.

This book is intended for academics, researchers, PhD candidates, postgraduates and anyone interested in war literature.

Writers at War addresses the most immediate representations of the First World War in the prose of Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, Siegfried Sassoon and Mary Borden; it interrogates the various ways in which these writers contended with conveying their war experience from the temporal and spatial proximity of the warzone and investigates the multifarious impact of the war on the (re)development of their aesthetics. It also interrogates to what extent these texts aligned with or challenged existing social, cultural, philosophical and aesthetic norms.

While this book is concerned with literary technique, the rich existing scholarship on questions of gender, trauma and cultural studies on World War I literature serves as a foundation. This book does not oppose these perspectives but offers a complementary approach based on close critical reading. The distinctiveness of this study stems from its focus on the question of representation and form and on the specific role of the war in the four authors’ literary careers. This is the first scholarly work concerned exclusively with theorising prose written from the immediacy of the war.

This book is intended for academics, researchers, PhD candidates, postgraduates and anyone interested in war literature.

The Ecopoetics of War explores the interrelationality of human and nonhuman entities in the context of conflict, as recorded in literature and culture. This collection of essays demonstrates the specific and fertile role of literature in representations of war, as it foregrounds the manifold ways in which the borders between human and nonhuman—including flora,fauna, and technology—become porous, thus questioning traditional onto-epistemological and ethical categories.

Bringing together British, American, and postcolonial studies, The Ecopoetics of War covers a variety of historical periods, geographical areas, and literary genres. Interdisciplinary in its outlook, it intertwines war studies, ecocriticism, literary theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. By analyzing the stylistic and discursive strategies devised by writers to translate the sensory experience of the battlefield, the contributors shed light on the unique capacity of literature to foreground the entanglement of human and nonhuman in the context of armed conflict, and thus unveil an “ecopoetics of war.”

This collection will interest scholars of literature, specialists of war studies and ecocriticism, and any reader interested in such issues such as ecowar, ecocide, the Anthropocene, or environmental justice. It can inspire interdisciplinary teaching or research projects, especially in the current context of global environmental crisis.