“Brought up in an Illusion”: Jacob’s Room as Modernist Anti-War Novel.

: Jacob’s Room is often categorized as a war novel, despite Virginia Woolf’s decision to excise the presence of the First World War from its pages. Jacob Flanders perishes in the trenches, yet the war is never named, leaving behind an empty rift in the text—a conscious choice that reflects Woolf’s political disavowal of violence. In the form of an abbreviated Künstlerroman, a novel charting the development of a young artist, Woolf chronicles Jacob’s journey from boyhood to manhood: his time at Cambridge, his steps towards artistic inclinations in London, and his appreciation of Italy and Greece during his time as a soldier in the Great War. This tale ends tragically, not with the development of a young artist, but the artist’s death during the war. I read Jacob’s early enculturation into masculinity: he has “been brought up in an illusion,” a phrase which shapes the novel’s form and prevents individuality of character. In crafting a careful indictment of martial masculinity, Woolf creates a modernist anti-war novel that not only questions what it means to depict war through a pacifist lens but that also challenges the form of the novel itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]