Reading the Ruins : Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture.

Cover; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Chapter 1 Imagining destruction; Beautiful bomb-laden Zeppelins; The interwar imagination; Unrest in the wake of bombs; Extrapolation of weapons; Lessons of Spain; Depicting casualties; 1939 and all that; Episodic losses of perspective; Targets and narrative; A bomb casualty or war avenger?; Bone as bomb victim; Chapter 2 A metropolis aflame; William Sansom and disorientation; Time was away; Allegory and physicality; Bodies, various; Louis MacNeice and complicity; Trolls in the smoke.

Aesthetics of destructionHenry Green: fire and the limits of description; Framing fire; Dreading forwards; Telling stories; Elegiac possibilities; Elegies from fire; Encounters in the flames; Ash and paper; Ritual and redemption?; Fire and paper; Chapter 3 Surrealism and the bombsites; Pre-war surrealism in Britain; The organicist turn; Wartime is 'surreal'; Turning fragments into structures: David Gascoyne and J.F. Hendry; Zero hour and no man's land; Back to the bombsites; Apocalyptics; J.F. Hendry; From Guernica to London; The limits of a dialectic.

Organic sensations: Graham Sutherland and Lynette RobertsSwansea raid; Sensations from the body and the air; War pictures; A war artist; Captions and anger: Lee Miller and Humphrey Jennings; Grim glory; Anger and the human form; Jennings in the 1930s; London Can Take it; Decodable patriotism; Ballardian legacies; Chapter 4 The haunted city; Graham Greene and the idea of haunting; Ruins and amnesia; Ghosting treason: damaged buildings; David Jones: making your own archaeology; Jones and the ghosts of wars; Traces, textures and expansiveness; Ghosts in the footnotes; Acts of recovery.

Bowen's ghostsThe territory of the city; Shallow, cratered, extinct; Buried memories; Chapter 5 The new London jungle; Precursors and portents; Mundanity and willowherb; Rose Macaulay's history of fears; London as a green world; Greenery; Priests in the foliage; Fireweed rampant; What the plants hide; War games; Shapes of the past; Literary salvage; The modernist fragment displayed; Postwar pleasures and fears; Triffids in the unofficial countryside; The environmental turn, postmodernity, and back to the bombsite; Coda; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

This vivid reading of wartime culture investigates the significance of London's bombsites by bringing together famous and forgotten authors.

Print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

English.

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