Haunted armistice: The Great War, modern British literature, and the mourning of historical trauma.

The Armistice serves as the Great War's haunted point of closure in Britain. By combining literary and historical analysis with psychoanalysis and trauma theory, my interdisciplinary approach to the Great War enables a multifaceted exploration of the dynamics of unresolved mourning after catastrophic events through both general and historically specific modes of investigation. Chapter One addresses the unresolved crises of cultural and medical mediation occasioned by shell shock. I then suggest that contemporary scholarship which reformulates trauma and mourning after Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) effectively recalls the specters of the century's first massive trauma. Chapter Two foregrounds the scholar's participation in the cultural transmission and reception of catastrophic events through practical and theoretical formulations of trauma and mourning. In Chapter Three, diverse conceptualizations of mourning and survivorship are juxtaposed in illustration of the challenges which trauma poses to any unitary formulation of its aftermath. And adapting scholarship on the Second World War, Chapter Four considers the ways that secondary narratives of the Great War continue to engage the dynamics of historical trauma through an abiding preoccupation with the frontsoldier. In Part Two, by reclassifying the poems of Owen and Sassoon as poetic testimonies, Chapter Five privileges their urgent transmission and reception of harrowing experience and unresolved mourning. Chapter Six then contrasts the oppositional engagement of Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) with official modes of memory-work configured after the Armistice by national commemorative sites such as the Cenotaph and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. In Chapter Seven, the postwar suicide of a veteran in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) merely dramatizes that the specters of the War haunted the peace, a peace belied by numerous unresolved losses which contributed to the Second World War. Finally, Chapter Eight discusses Jones's In Parenthesis (1937) and its reconstruction of the haunted topography of the Somme, a landscape central to the War and its aftermath in Britain. In conclusion, I highlight the belated literature of historical trauma at the millennium as it continues to engage the cultural work of mourning initiated by the Great War generation