1 Missing in Action: Repression, Return, and the Post-War Uncanny 1
Notes 1 Missing in Action: Repression, Return, and the Post-War Uncanny 1. The First World War is commonly pointed to as a pivotal event that prompted writers to search for new literary forms and modes of expres- sion. Hazel McNair Hutchinson suggests that wartime themes of “anxiety, futility, fragmentation and introspection would extend into post-war writing and would become hallmarks of American Modernist literature.” The first world conflict produced novels such as John Dos Passos’ One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) based on his experi- ences as a volunteer ambulance driver and Three Solders (1921), which investigates the war’s psychological impact. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) includes sparse yet graphic depictions of bat- tle, and his first novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (1927) chronicles the aftermath of the war for those who were physically or emotion- ally wounded. Many major American authors of the 1920s and 1930s were personally impacted by the war, and it continually surfaces in the works of writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, e. e. cum- mings, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. For a brief discussion of American literature influenced by the First World War, see Hazel McNair Hutchison, “American Literature of World War One,” The Literary Encyclopedia (July 2, 2007), http:// www.litencyc.com/ php/ stop- ics.php?rec=true&UID=1735. 2. Maxwell Geismar, “The Shifting Illusion,” in American Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 53. 3. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schuman, eds., Life After Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7.
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