My book
Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in Post-World War I British Fiction is now available from Ashgate Press.
Looking closely at both case histories of shell
shock and Modernist novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia
Woolf, Wyatt Bonikowski shows how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and
the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary imagination.
Situating his study with respect to Freud’s concept of the death drive,
Bonikowski reads the repetitive symptoms of shell-shocked soldiers as a
resistance to representation and narrative. In making this resistance part of
their narratives, Ford, West, and Woolf broaden our understanding of the
traumatic effects of war, exploring the possibility of a connection between the
trauma of war and the trauma of sexuality. Parade’s End, The Return of the
Soldier, and Mrs. Dalloway are all structured around the relationship between
the soldier who returns from war and the women who receive him, but these
novels offer no prospect for the healing effects of the union between men and
women. Instead, the novels underscore the divisions within the home and the
self, drawing on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link
between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of the relations
between self and other.
