Book at Lunchtime: Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War

Join us for an online TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on
Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World
War written by Dr Alice Kelly. Book at Lunchtime is a series of
bite-sized book discussions held fortnightly during term-time, with
commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to
attend and open to all. About the book: One of the key questions of
modern literature was the problem of what to do with the war dead.
Through a series of case studies focusing on nurse narratives,
Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, as
well as visual and material culture, Commemorative Modernisms:
Women Writers, Death and the First World War provides the first
sustained study of women’s literary representations of death and
the culture of war commemoration that underlie British and American
literary modernism. Considering previously neglected writing by
women in the war zones and at home, as well as the marginalised
writings of well-known modernist authors, and drawing on
international archival research, this book demonstrates the
intertwining of modernist, war, and memorial culture, and broadens
the canon of war writing. Author Alice Kelly is currently a
Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Sussex, and
the Communications Officer here at the Rothermere American
Institute, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on
twentieth-century literary and cultural history in Britain and
America. As well as Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death
and the First World War (2020), Alice has published a critical
edition of Edith Wharton’s First World War reportage, Fighting
France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (2015), and essays on modernist
and First World War literature. She has held Fellowships at Yale
University, New York University, and a British Academy Rising Stars
Award for her interdisciplinary seminar series Cultures and
Commemorations of War. https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/people/alice-kelly
Panel: Michael Whitworth is a Professor of Modern Literature and
Culture at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively
on Virginia Woolf, with his most recent work being an edition of
Virginia Woolf's Night and Day for Cambridge University Press
(published 2018). His previous publications include Einstein’s
Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature, and chapters
on Oliver Lodge’s science writing and Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry. He
is currently working a project concerning on science, poetry, and
specialization in the early twentieth century, Laura Rattray is
Reader in American Literature at the University of Glasgow and
Director of its Centre for American Studies. She has teaching and
research interests in modern American literature and culture,
women’s writing and gender, editing and publishing history. In 2016
she founded the Transatlantic Literary Women series, funded by the
British Association for American Studies and US Embassy small
grants programme. Publications include Twenty-First-Century
Readings of Tender Is the Night (co-editor with William Blazek),
The New Edith Wharton Studies (co-editor with Jennifer Haytock) and
The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, while her new monograph,
Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction, is published by Palgrave
Macmillan. J​ay Winter​ is the Charles J. Stille Professor of
History Emeritus at Yale University. He is a specialist on World
War I and its impact on the 20th century. Previously, Winter taught
at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warwick, the
University of Cambridge, and Columbia University. In 2001, he
joined the faculty of Yale. Winter is the author or co-author of 25
books, including ​Socialism and the Challenge of War; Ideas and
Politics in Britain, 1912-18​; ​Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning:
The Great War in European Cultural History​; ​The Great War and the
Shaping of the 20th Century;​ ​Rene Cassin and the rights of man​,
and most recently, ​War beyond words: Languages of remembrance from
the Great War to the present​.