Touch and Intimacy in First World War LiteratureThe First World War ravaged the male body on an unprecedented scale, yet fostered moments of physical intimacy and tenderness among the soldiers in the trenches. Touch, the most elusive and private of the senses, became central to war experience. War writing is haunted by experiences of physical contact: from the muddy realities of the front to the emotional intensity of trench life, to the traumatic obsession with the wounded body in nurses' memoirs. Through extensive archival and historical research, analysing previously unknown letters and diaries alongside literary writings by figures such as Owen and Brittain, Santanu Das recovers the sensuous world of the First World War trenches and hospitals. This original and evocative study alters our understanding of the period as well as of the body at war, and illuminates the perilous intimacy between sense experience, emotion and language as we try to make meaning in times of crisis. |
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andthe asthe atthe Bagnold Barbusse Barbusse’s battlefield Blunden bodily Borden British Brittain Cambridge University Céline Collected Poems consciousness CP&F D. H. Lawrence dead death Diary dugout emotional erotic experience Faber Figure FirstWorld flesh Flora Murray Forbidden Zone formlessness Freud fromthe gender geography German hand haptic Harmondsworth Higonnet homoeroticism homosexuality horror hospital human Imperial War Museum inhis inthe trenches intimacy intoa Isaac Rosenberg isthe IWM DOC kiss language letter literary London male body Man’s Manchester memoirs memory Modernism narrative night notes nurses ofthe ofwar onthe Owen’s Oxford University Press pain Penguin perception physical poet poetry prewar Remarque’s Roland Rosenberg Sassoon sense sexual shell shellshock Siegfried Siegfried Sassoon soldiers Stallworthy tactile Testament Testament of Youth thebody thetrenches thewar tobe tothe touch trans trauma Trench Warfare Vera Brittain verse Western Front Wilfred Owen withthe witnessing women Woolf World World War WorldWar wounds writes WTWY