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“Pursued by an Infinite Legion of Eumenides”: Richard Aldington and the Trauma of Survival

By Elizabeth Vandiver

1929 was a watershed year for the war memoir and the war novel. Graves’ Good-bye to All That, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front all appeared that year, as did Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero. Although it is little read now, Aldington’s novel sold more than 10,000 copies in its first three months in print. It mirrors the better-known texts in its strongly autobiographical plot and its outspoken anger at the waste of war.

The Great War and Modernism’s Siren Songs

By Leah Culligan Flack

At the end of the Great War, Ezra Pound lamented, “There died a myriad, / And, of the best, among them / … for two gross of broken statues, / for a few thousand battered books” (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, V). Responding to the War’s senseless devastation and to a post-war culture in ruins became a central, defining task of Pound’s art and that of his modernist contemporaries.

The Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses as Post-war Epics

By Stephanie Nelson

The last words of Joyce’s Ulysses are not, in fact, “yes I said yes I will Yes.” They are “Trieste-Zurich-Paris / 1914-1921.” Joyce’s insistence on ending his books with the dates and times of their composition vividly reminds the reader that Ulysses was composed during the Great War and in its midst; moreover, the bulk of Ulysses, and in particular the episodes that break out of what Joyce termed the “initial style,” were composed between March 1918 and October 1921 during a period when Joyce’s own life was deeply affected by the War.