ABSTRACT
This chapter is the introduction to Writers at War: Exploring the Prose of Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, Siegfried Sassoon and Mary Borden. Through close textual analysis, this study addresses prose representations of the First World War by writers who had first-hand experience of the war on the Western Front. Its goal is to interrogate the various ways in which these writers contended with representing their war experience from the temporal and spatial immediacy of the front, and to investigate the multifarious impact of the war on the (re)development of their aesthetics. It highlights the variety and common paradigms of the texts studied. It delineates the tensions intrinsic to war writing that are examined in this volume: between the urge to witness and representational aporia, speechlessness and expressivity, strong visuality and scopic limitations, the simultaneity of retrospection and prospection. The introduction ends with a short presentation of each chapter and a reflection on the imprint of the First World War that endures to this day.
