Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination

Bonikowski examines how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and the symptoms of war trauma were transformed in novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf. Situating his study with respect to Freud’s concept of the death drive, Bonikowski shows how these novelists drew on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of the relations between self and other.