Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War by Alice Kelly (review).

"Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War" by Alice Kelly is a systematic study that explores the relationship between modernism and the First World War. The author focuses on the unprecedented scale and mechanized nature of war deaths and argues that modernist experimentation, particularly in women's writing, emerges as a response to representing these deaths. The book examines the effects of the war on European and American attitudes towards death and the role of women in corresponding rituals. It is organized into three sections that explore different degrees of proximity to the war, highlighting the evolution of modernist experimentation in response to death and commemoration. The study concludes by discussing how war death becomes integrated into modernist aesthetics, with women writers often expressing their preoccupation with the war dead through dreams and ghosts. [Extracted from the article]