| Summary: | Literary and cultural-historical debate about the First World War has focused on whether the conflict inaugurated a new modernity or whether it revealed deep continuities, particularly in the area of memorialization. The debate can productively be widened by expanding the scope of critical attention to include, not only English trench poetry, but also the creative production of women, non-combatants, civilians, and writers and artists from Europe and the then British Empire. This enlarged canon, which in this text ranges from the British combatant poets Wilfred Owen and David Jones to the writers and nurses Mary Borden and Enid Bagnold, the civilian novelists H.G. Wells and Virginia Woolf, and the international authors Robert Service, Berta Lask, Claire Studer Goll, Ricarda Huch, Gertrud Kolmar, and Anna Akhmatova, enables us to rethink the very meanings of terms such as 'modernity' and 'modernism'
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