| This project explores representations of wounds and losses in World War I, as well as representations of British and American citizens attempting to survive them in the wartime and postwar period. Focussing on cultural and literary attempts to locate Great War sites of loss, my interdisciplinary work examines canonical and non-canonical novels by Ford Madox Ford, Mary A. Ward, Ernest Hemingway, George W. Lee, and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the context of a variety of complementary texts: medical studies of shell shock, army reports, mass media accounts, official propaganda, photographic records, commemorative volumes, battlefield guidebooks, and physical memorial spaces. Establishing a dialogue between literary and non-literary texts, each chapter explores the formal and stylistic methods through which writers articulate the disfigured bodies, fractured selves, and shattered communities of the conflict. Combining cultural studies methodologies with theories of materiality and embodied subjectivity, I read representations of wounds as sites of tension where efforts to articulate and displace the contours of loss meet with counter-discourses of determined resiliency and enactments of troubled recoveries.;The first half of this work develops literary-historical narratives of British and American shell shock. Authorities in both countries attempted to shift accountability for the disorder onto the "neuropathically tainted"—conclusions tethered in England to class and in America to race. Ford, Hemingway, and Lee respond to such displacements with shell shock narratives that return matters to combat wounds suffered both during the war and in the Jim Crow aftermath. The second half explores representations of material sites of loss in the transatlantic World War I imaginary. Since most people at the time did not see combat first-hand, visions of the front during the war, and visits to the former battlefields afterwards, offered fraught opportunities for locating the "missing." Through the construction of masculinities and memorial spaces, Ward and Fitzgerald testify to the compulsions and frustrations involved in finding the words for material losses and enduring wounds. |
