"The land of my dreams": the gendered utopian dreams and disenchantment of British literary ex-combatants of the Great War

The last two decades have seen a slow shift in the academic understanding of the impact of the Great War on concepts of gender in interwar Britain. The work of a small group of cultural historians, following in the footsteps of Rosa Maria Bracco, has challenged existing interpretations of the cultural impact of the Great War on concepts of gender. The argument that the wartime advances made by women in Great War in Britain, allied to combatant trauma, resulted in a crisis of masculinity and a related heightening of misogyny, has been questioned by one that challenges the notion of a crisis of masculinity, stresses continuity in gender constructs, and develops a more complex picture of cultural responses to the war