Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World WarThis 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as contemporary theorists of nostalgia and trauma, this book examines the pathology of nostalgia conveyed in Sassoon's unpublished poems, letters and journals, together with his published work.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. |
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Contents
| 1 | |
1 The Space Between the Wars | 18 |
2 Rivers Myers and the Culture of War Neuroses | 28 |
The Challenge of Autognosis in the Interwar Years | 54 |
Ghosts and Spirits in Sassoons Patriotic Verse of the Second World War | 82 |
Nostalgia and Sassoons Personal Poems 19405 | 97 |
Other editions - View all
Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War Robert Hemmings No preview available - 2008 |
Common terms and phrases
anxiety appeared associated autobiographical become Blunden British called Cambridge University Library Charles Myers childhood Collected Poems connection critics cultural death describes Diaries dreams early England English example experience expressed Faber Faber & Faber feeling figure final forces Freud Georgian Hart-Davis human Ibid imagined invokes Italy Journey kind later letter literary London look loss Manuscript Department meaning memoirs memories mental mind modern modernist natural neuroses nostalgia nostalgic noted observed offers Old Century once Papers of Siegfried past period poet poetic poetry present prose psychological published quoted recollection remembering Repression revisit Rivers Rivers’s Robert rooms rural Second World seems sense shell shock Sherston Siegfried Sassoon social soldiers space spiritual suggests trauma turn uncanny unconscious understand University Press Unpublished vision volume wartime Weald of Youth writing wrote York
Bibliographic information
| Title | Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War |
| Author | Robert Hemmings |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press, 2008 |
| ISBN | 0748633073, 9780748633074 |
| Length | 168 pages |
| Subjects | › Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / Poetry |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |