Shattering terrain and lives, the First World War challenged the representative power of words, maps, and visual art. This book tells the untold story of literary responses, showing how modernist fictional topographies by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and others shaped the meaning of the war and offered reconstructions of self and culture. Restoring their fiction to a context of spaces and places recorded in a wealth of previously neglected archival materials, this innovative study ranges across literature, cartography, geography, and art history to reorient our knowledge of modernism, revealing its promise of healing and redemption.

This book shows how British authors used landscape description to shape the meaning of the First World War. Using a broad range of critically neglected archival materials, it reexamines modernist and traditional writing to reveal how various modes of topographical representation allowed authors to construct healing responses to the war.