Death, men and modernism : trauma and narrative in British fiction from Hardy to Woolf

Death, Men and Modernism argues that the figure of the dead man becomes a locus of attention and a symptom of crisis in British writing of the early to mid-Twentieth century.

While Victorian writers used dying women to dramatise aesthetic, structural and historical concerns, Modernist novelists turned to the figure of the dying man to exemplify concerns about both masculinity and modernity.

Along with their representations of death, these novelists developed new narrative techniques to make the trauma they depicted palpable.

The emergence of the figure of the dead man in texts as early as Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure also suggested that modernist genealogies which place the crisis point of modernity, masculinity and trauma.

Thus in this account the First World War intensified but did not cause these anxieties.

This book elaborates a nodal point which links death, masculinity and modernity years before the events of the First World War.