This book shows how British authors used landscape description to shape the meaning of the First World War. It restores their fiction to largely forgotten cultural contexts of cartography, geography, and art history, using a broad range of critically neglected archival materials. Reexamining modernist and traditional writing in this light reveals how various modes of topographical representation, informed by pictorial and mapmaking conventions and globalizing visions, allowed authors to construct healing responses to the war. The first critical work to examine these topics, this book will appeal to informed readers, graduate students, and professors interested in British modernism, the modern novel, literature of war, space and place in literature, and the philosophy of literature. Its conclusions challenge several critical orthodoxies about the role of landscape and maps in literature. Even more importantly, this book adventurously explains the redemptive promise of modernism in the face of the war’s destructive power.
