A War Imagined

Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s the First World War opens like a gap in time. England after the war was a different place; the arts were different; history was different; sex, society, class were all different.

Samuel Hynes examines the process of that transformation. He explores a vast cultural mosaic comprising novels and poetry, music and theatre, journalism, paintings, films, parliamentary debates, public monuments, sartorial fashions, personal diaries and letters.

Told in rich detail, this penetrating account shatters much of the received wisdom about the First World War. It shows how English culture adapted itself to the needs of killing, how our stereotypes of the war gradually took shape and how the nations thought and imagination were profoundly and irretrievably changed.

Samuel Hynes is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature as Princeton University. Together with his earlier works-The Edwardian Turn of MindandThe Auden Generation- A War Imaginedforms an important continuous study of the relationship between literature, the arts and th4e events of history during the first four decades of the twentieth century.