This course considers the centrality of war—and three specific wars—to Anglophone modernism. We will examine literary representations of three conflicts that dramatically shaped European society and cultural production in the first half of the 20th century: the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. Moving from the combative violence of the pre-World War I avant-gardes to the emergence of fascism in the 1920s and the aerial bombing of urban centers, our course will investigate the blurred line between literature and history in years of profound crisis. We will read works by both combatants and non-combatants, and encounter a fundamental dilemma that split modernist writers and artists throughout the period: should art reflect social and historical conditions or exist “for its own sake”? Readings will include the British war poets, Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948), along with essays by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and W. G. Sebald. (B, G, H)