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With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Andrew Frayn, Lecturer in
Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier
University.In these two compelling novels H.G. Wells imagines
terrifying futures in which civilisation itself is threatened. The
narrator of The War of the Worlds is quick to discover that what
appeared to be a falling star was, in fact, a metallic cylinder
landing from Mars. Six million people begin to flee London in panic
as tentacled invaders emerge and overpower the city. With their
heat-ray, killing machines, black gas, and a taste for fresh human
blood, is there anything that can be done to stop the Martians? In
The War in the Air, naive but resourceful Bert Smallways is
thrilled by speed and fascinated by the new flying machines. His
curiosity sweeps him away by accident into a German plan to conquer
America, beginning with the destruction of New York. The ease of
movement in aerial warfare means that nothing and nobody is safe as
Total War erupts, civilisation crumbles, and Bert's hopes of
getting back to London to marry his love seem impossibly distant.
It has become axiomatic that First World War literature was
disenchanted, or disillusioned, and returning combatants were
unable to process or communicate that experience. In Writing
disenchantment, Andrew Frayn argues that this was not just about
the war: non-combatants were just as disenchanted as those who
fought, and writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf
produced some of the sharpest criticisms. Its language already
existed in contemporary sociological and historical accounts of the
problems of mass culture and the modern city, whose structures
contained the conflict and were strengthened during it. Archival
material, sales data and reviews are used to chart disenchantment
in a wide range of early twentieth-century war literature from
novels about fears of invasion and pacifism, through the modernist
novels of the 1920s to its dominance in the War Books Boom of
1928-30. This book will appeal to scholars and students of English
literature, social and cultural history, and gender studies. -- .
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