Tim Dayton - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Tim Dayton

A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War

American Poetry and the First World War

First World War Studies, 2019

Edith Wharton, best known to most readers as the author of novels exploring the world of upper-cl... more Edith Wharton, best known to most readers as the author of novels exploring the world of upper-class New York City in works such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, experienced the First World War both intensively and extensively. Wharton did not have a casual interest in the war as an event, nor did she take the attitude of an onlooker at a massive catastrophe; rather, she was engaged by and in the war as a partisan in what she saw as a conflict between the bastion of civilization, France, and a nation inimical to that civilization, Germany. "France and civilization," Hazel Hutchison writes, "seemed indivisible, and Wharton was ready to defend both" (). This partisanship in the cause of France characterizes Wharton's writing during these years, writing that covers a variety of literary forms, and this variety of forms indicates the extensive nature of Wharton's experience of the war as a writer: Wharton produced poetry, fiction, and journalism, and edited an anthology centered on the war.  The fictional narratives spring in part from Wharton's attempt to explore and depict the emotional, experiential aspects of the war, which in turn are based on her direct experience of living in France during wartime. Wharton's journalism is based on her familiarity with France, and especially with France during wartime. The anthology Wharton edited, The Book of the Homeless, emerged out of Wharton's efforts to assist Belgian refugees that found their way to Paris following the German invasion of . While Wharton was not a combatant, the war engaged her attention at least as fully as it did that of other American writers, including those who served in the military or the volunteer ambulance units. But if Wharton's war writing is less familiar than is The House of Mirth, it is not altogether different. As Wai-Chee Dimock notes about that novel,

First World War Studies, 2012

The American poet Alan Seeger imagined the First World War as an opportunity to realize medieval ... more The American poet Alan Seeger imagined the First World War as an opportunity to realize medieval values, which were embodied for him in Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney epitomized Seeger's three ideals: "Love and Arms and Song," which contrasted with the materialism and sophistication of modernity. His embrace of "Arms" and the desire for intense, authentic experience led Seeger, who was living in Paris in August 1914, to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, in which he served until his death in combat in July 1916. As an infantryman Seeger had extensive experience of the Western front. This concrete experience of the war, of the indignities of life in the trenched and the dominance of technology, contrasted in significant ways with war as constructed in Seeger's medievalist imagination. Seeger, however, reconciled this contradiction by seeing the war as part of the elemental Strife of nature. By this means, Seeger avoided the potentially unsettling consequences of confronting the profoundly modern nature of the war. Interpreting the war as a form of "Strife" and as an assertion of medieval values allowed Seeger to imagine himself and his comrades to be living outside the world of industrial capitalist modernity. Seeger shared with others involved in the war this medievalism and the belief that the war offered relief from the values of modernity, even if Seeger's medievalism was more intense, more thoroughgoing, than was common. However, Seeger's death as a result of wounds received from machine gun fire vividly displays the contradiction between his imagination and the reality of industrialized warfare. The example of Seeger thus suggests that the American effort in the First World War was underwritten in part by an ideology through which a modern, industrialized war was embraced in terms derived from the imagined medieval past. Insofar as this is true medievalism functioned to provide an ideology that constructed, in the terminology of Raymond Williams, an alternative to the industrial capitalist modernity from which the war emerged, an alternative ideology that allowed the war to be imagined differently from what it was, but which posed no substantive challenge to the war's social and economic realities.

Clues: A Journal of Detection, 2007