A war imagined: the First World War and English culture

Abstract

Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s, between the England of Pomp and Circumstance, the first Post-Impressionist show and Man and Superman and the England of The Land, Facade and The Green Hat, 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. Because of the war, England after the war was a different place: the arts were different; history was different; sex, society, class were all different. Samuel Hynes records the process of that transformation of the English imagination, from the war's beginning, through crises and disasters, into post-war England with its disillusionment, social fragmentation and Waste Land spirit. He draws not only on the major literary texts of those years, but on newspaper and magazine writings, paintings, music, parliamentary debates, films, personal diaries and letters. From this store of contemporary records comes a portrayal of the great change that the war forced upon English imaginations, and of the cultural consequences.

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