Modern nostalgia : Siegfried Sassoon, trauma and the Second World War /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Hemmings, Robert.
Imprint:	Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, c2008.
Description:	vii, 160 p. ; 25 cm.
Language:	English
Subject:	Sassoon, Siegfried, -- 1886-1967 -- Criticism and interpretation. Sassoon, Siegfried, -- 1886-1967. World War (1939-1945) World War, 1939-1945 -- Literature and the war. Psychic trauma in literature. Nostalgia in literature. War in literature. Nostalgia in literature. Psychic trauma in literature. War and literature. War in literature. Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/7360600

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780748633067 0748633065
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	"This 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as contemporary theorists of nostalgia and trauma, this book examines the pathology of nostalgia conveyed in Sassoon's unpublished poems, letters and journals, together with his published work.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." "This study teases out the relationship between nostalgia, trauma and autobiography, and forges connections between the literatures of the two world wars. As a case study of modern nostalgia, this book offers an alternative to the perception that Sassoon's historical and cultural relevance touches the First World War only."--BOOK JACKET.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Literary Nostalgias
Nostalgia: Pathos and Pathology
Modernist Nostalgia
Georgian Nostalgia
1. The Space Between the Wars
Rural Revival and the Georgian Legacy
The Autobiographical Turn
2. Rivers, Myers and the Culture of War Neuroses
Trauma
Traumatic Neuroses and Modern War
Charles Myers and 'Shell Shock'
Rivers, Maghull and the English Psychoanalytic Approach
Uncanny Doublings
Trauma: The Historical Return
Sassoon's Rivers
Visions of War's Return
3. Witnessing and Survival: The Challenge of 'Autognosis' in the Interwar Years
The Return of the War: Key Poems of the 1920s
Prose Autognosis
Uncanny Returns: Poetry of War and Dreams in the 1930s
Looking Back: Sassoon's Aesthetics
4. Wartime Revisited: Ghosts and Spirits in Sassoon's Patriotic Verse of the Second World War
Awake to the Nightmare: 3 September 1939
The Limits of Reclusion: Patriotism and the Revival of the Pre-protest War Poet
Civilian War Poet I: The War Poems
5. Look Back to 'Gladness': Nostalgia and Sassoon's Personal Poems, 1940-5
Rhymed Ruminations (1940)
Civilian War Poet II: Wartime Sanctuary and the Limited Consolation of the English Countryside
The Encroaching War: Trauma and Detachment
6. Narcissism and Autognosis: Sassoon, 1936-42
Narcissism and Autobiography
Narcissism and Autognosis
Narcissus and The Old Century
Nostalgia: Disease and Antidote
7. Liminal Moments, Uncanny Spaces: Sassoon's Autobiography and the Modern Subject
The Threshold
Interiors
Atop the Stairs
Constructing the Mature 'Sassoon'
Ghosts of Selves Past
Conclusion: Modern Nostalgia, Absence and Loss
Index

Modern nostalgia : Siegfried Sassoon, trauma and the Second World War /

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