Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World WarSarah Cole examines the rich literary and cultural history of masculine intimacy in the twentieth century. Cole approaches this complex and neglected topic from many perspectives - as a reflection of the exceptional social power wielded by the institutions that housed and structured male bonds; as a matter of closeted and thwarted homoerotics; as part of the story of the First World War. Cole shows that the terrain of masculine fellowship provides an important context for understanding key literary features of the modernist period. She foregrounds such crucial themes as the over-determined relations between imperial wanderers in Conrad's tales, the broken friendships that permeate Forster's fictions, Lawrence's desperate urge to make culture out of blood brotherhood and the intense bereavement of the war poet. Cole argues that these dramas of compelling and often tortured male friendship have helped to define a particular spirit and voice within the literary canon. |
From inside the book
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Page 6
... physical body, the loss of ideological cover for imperialist myths, the actual experience of intimacy in war, the disruption wreaked by injury and debility: each of these problems in effect propels the individual out of the safe space ...
... physical body, the loss of ideological cover for imperialist myths, the actual experience of intimacy in war, the disruption wreaked by injury and debility: each of these problems in effect propels the individual out of the safe space ...
Page 7
... physical, psychological, epistemological, and ethical. As Paul Fussell writes in his influential study of the war and modernity, “I am saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ...
... physical, psychological, epistemological, and ethical. As Paul Fussell writes in his influential study of the war and modernity, “I am saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ...
Page 8
... physical body. The cultural history of the male body reached a crisis point in the experience of the war, as the clash between tech- nological innovation and physical vulnerability exploded beyond people's wildest pre-war imaginings ...
... physical body. The cultural history of the male body reached a crisis point in the experience of the war, as the clash between tech- nological innovation and physical vulnerability exploded beyond people's wildest pre-war imaginings ...
Page 9
... physical qualities: pain, dismemberment, pleasure, detachment from the practices of narrative.14 Several models for thinking about male intimacy and the sexual body have received extensive theoretical treatment. The first involves the ...
... physical qualities: pain, dismemberment, pleasure, detachment from the practices of narrative.14 Several models for thinking about male intimacy and the sexual body have received extensive theoretical treatment. The first involves the ...
Page 10
... physical desire. What I have found perhaps most remarkable in these investigations is that it is not easy to predict where or why friendship will falter, or a conflict will emerge between personal intimacy and its institutionalization ...
... physical desire. What I have found perhaps most remarkable in these investigations is that it is not easy to predict where or why friendship will falter, or a conflict will emerge between personal intimacy and its institutionalization ...
Contents
1 | |
21 | |
CHAPTER 2 Conradian alienation and imperial intimacy | 92 |
friendship and comradeship at war | 138 |
DHLawrence and the aftermath of war | 185 |
Notes | 252 |
Index | 292 |
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Common terms and phrases
Aaron’s aesthetic aestheticized alienation Birkin British Cambridge Carpenter’s century characterized civilian combat comradeship Conrad conventional create critics cultural D. H. Lawrence death desire discussion E. M. Forster England English erotic ethos Fiction figure former soldiers Forster gender Greek Heart of Darkness Hellenism homoerotic homosexual idea ideal imagined imperial individual institutions isolation Joseph Conrad Kemp kind language Lawrence’s literary literature London Longest Journey Lord Jim male body male bonds male community male fellowship male friendship male intimacy male love male relations Marlow masculine Maurice men’s modernist modernity narrative novel organization Oxford Passage to India Pater perhaps physical poem poet political post-war problem public schools racial represents returned rituals romance Sassoon seems sense Septimus sexual Shere Ali social spirit story stress structure suggests Symonds T. S. Eliot text’s tradition University Press Victorian voice war’s women Women in Love Woolf writing York