While literary scholars and historians often draw on the press as a source of information, First World War periodicals have rarely been studied as cultural artefacts in their own right. However, as this volume shows, the press not only played a vital role in the conflict, but also underwent significant changes due to the war. This Companion brings together leading and emerging scholars from various fields to reassess the role and function of the periodical press during the so-called 'Greater War'. It pays specific attention to the global aspects of the war, as well as to different types of periodicals that existed during the conflict, ranging from trench, hospital and camp journals to popular newspapers, children's magazines and avant-garde journals in various national and cultural contexts.

Shifts the scholarly conversation on modernism and war from shell shock to material culture Provides the first book-length study of the material culture of the First World War through the lens of modernist literature Rethinks the relationship between modernism and armed conflict in tangible terms by exploring how the things of war helped shape modernism Offers an alternative to familiar accounts of modernism and shell shock Explores canonical and lesser-known authors from Britain, Europe and the colonial world to cover a wide range of war experiences Turns to unexpected and newly discovered print artefacts from the modernist archives, including trench newspapers, shop signs, travel guides and other sources at the margins of the canon What did modernist writers make of the things of war? Often studied for its fascination with the shell-shocked mind, modernist literature is also packed with more tangible traces of the First World War, from helmets, trench art and tombstones to shop signs, military newspapers and leaflets dropped from airplanes. Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War asks what experimental writers read into these objects and how the conflict prompted a way of thinking of their writings as objects in their own right. Ranging from 1914 to the early 1940s, the chapters in this book weave together prose and poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and Mulk Raj Anand.