1st Edition
English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950
By Petra Rau
Copyright 2009
244 Pages
by
Routledge
244 Pages
by
Routledge
244 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This is the first systematic study to trace the way representations of 'Germanness' in modernist British literature from 1890 to 1950 contributed to the development of English identity. Petra Rau examines the shift in attitudes towards Germany and Germans, from suspicious competitiveness in the late Victorian period to the aggressive hostility of the First World War and the curious inconsistencies... Read more
Contents: Introduction; 'A sickening suggestion of common guilt': German renegades and English heroes in Conrad's fiction; Forster's accessible foreignness: Prussian junkers versus 'German cosmopolitans'; Flirting with the beastly Hun: imperial anxiety and modern militarism in the popular fiction of Buchan, Le Oueux and Saki; Ford's 'tricky German fashion': medical modernity and Anglo-Saxon pathology; 'Monster men and women': Woolf's grotesque German body and Lawrence's 'bad' modernity; The 'soldiers of modernism': the lure of Fascist corporeality in travel writing and fiction; 'The thinning of the membrane between the This and the That': Englishness and espionage in blitz writing; Select bibliography; Index.
Biography
Petra Rau is Senior Lecturer in Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has published on modernism, travel writing, war literature and Anglo-German relations.
'[An] absorbing account...' Angermion ’[Rau’s] detailed knowledge of German and British culture not only sustains her readings of individual texts but provides a foundation for further study.’ D H Lawrence Review
