Publisher's Synopsis
Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf are only a few literary luminaries among the vast number of women who wrote about World War I. But their ranks also include more ordinary writers, who felt compelled to write about their often extraordinary experiences - as nurses, ambulance drivers, munitions workers and more - during the war. This text explores the literary, social and psychological themes that emerge from the writing of women from all walks of life. Their diaries, letters, newspaper and magazine pieces, short stories and novels document their powerful and complex response to what remains one of the most tumultuous periods in history.;Twayne's "Literature and Society Series" aims to demonstrate how the meanings of both literature and history are enhanced when each is understood in light of the other. Responding to growing scholarly interest in placing literature in its historical and cultural context, each study illuminates the relationship between a selected event, social movement, or technological innovation and the literature that has arisen from it. Each book also features a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
