The First World War, or the Great War as it used to be called, is rightly thought of as bringing cataclysmic changes in life and thought and social forms. Yet in acknowledging these transformations we must remember that revolutionary innovations, particularly in technology, already existed in 1914. The motorcar, the aeroplane, the cinema, the telephone, the principles of radio, were quite familiar, though the war greatly speeded their development. Similarly, many of the most radical manifestations of modernism in the arts belong to the immediate pre-war era.

In English Literature we need to distinguish between the writing, most often poetry, which directly expresses the personal experiences of the young men who went to war, and the major work by the emerging modernist writers that was published

We also have to mention great novelists like Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), whose most interesting novel was ‘The Good Soldier’ (which provides an interesting instance of the pre-war sense of crisis); Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), James Joyce (1882-1941) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) were also other of the great authors of this time.

Those authors who had fought in the war and been fortunate enough to survive were going back to it in memory and imagination.

It was a very literary war. The British nation had achieved a high degree of literacy and before the development of radio and television all mass communication was via the printed page. People read widely and the classics of English Literature were in general circulation. Young men of education went into the army as junior officers and in the conditions of the Western front, had a short expe

Some topics in this essay:
English Literature, War War, Rupert Brooke, Western Front, Edward Thomas, TS Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Madox Ford, European Expressionist, Trenches’ Rosenberg´s, english literature, western front, sense crisis,