War Trauma and Madness in the Fiction of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

In the literary works concerning the First World War, the plight of men suffering from war trauma has acquired emblematic status. With the horrors of trench warfare, World War I induced in those who had been subjected to the ordeals of the front symptoms such as nostalgia, neurasthenia, emotional distress, and also the acute, quasi-neurological mental states known as “shell shock.” Psychiatrists note that following five weeks of sustained combat, 98 per cent of combatants manifested war neuro..