A Farewell to Arms by E. Hemingway

 

Historical background

World War I broke out after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand ignited an already tense territorial feud between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. France, Britain, and Russia joined together as the Allied powers against the Central Power alliance of Austria-Hungary and Germany. Eventually, the US joined the war on the side of the Allies after the sinking of the Lusitania, a British passenger ship carrying 128 American citizens. The conflict lasted four years, cost $350 billion, and claimed the lives of twenty-two million.

The role of Italy in World War I was as a decoy. Traditionally, Italy was an ally of Germany and Austria. However, the allies promised Italy the land it had requested from Austria - the region of South Tyrol, several islands in the Adriatic, and assistance with the expansion of its colonies in Africa - if it would switch sides. The only role of Italy’s ill-equipped army was to attempt to divert the force of the Austrians from helping the Germans in France, a role which caused the death of 500,000 Italians in 1916 alone. Italy was able to turn back the Austrians and claim a share in the spoils of victory with the Allied cause.

Literary context

In his early works Hemingway depicted the lives of two types of people. One type consisted of men and women deprived, by World War I, of faith in the moral values in which they had believed and who lived with cynical disregard for anything but their own emotional needs. The other type were men of simple character and primitive emotions, such as soldiers, boxers and bullfighters. Hemingway wrote of their courageous and usually futile battles against circumstances.

The author began his writing career as a journalist, quickly adopting a minimalistic style due to the nature of reporting on immediate events that required little interpretation. This led to his writing style, captured in the iceberg theory. This is a theory of omission which suggests that the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface. Instead, like an iceberg, the bulk of what he wanted to convey lay underneath the surface, hinted at but never explicitly stated. Readers are thus encouraged to infer details and fill in gaps with their imagination, feelings, and interpretations.

Hemingway’s economical writing style often seems almost childlike. He provides detached descriptions of action, using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely, avoiding describing his characters’ emotions and thoughts directly. He offers the reader the raw material of an experience and eliminates the authorial viewpoint in order to make the reading of a text match the actual experience as closely as possible. He also believed that he could treat a subject honestly only if the writer had participated in or observed the subject closely. 

The success of his plain style in expressing deeply felt emotions contributed to the decline of the elaborate Victorian-era prose that characterised a great deal of American writing in the early 20th century. Another contemporary example of this approach is Scott Fitzgerald, a master at hiding symbolism in the simplest of writing. In The Great Gatsby, the protagonist's obsession with Daisy combined with his extravagant lifestyle symbolise deeper themes of the American Dream, disillusionment, and social class struggles, topics common to the outlook of the 'Lost Generation' in the U.S. postwar era.

(A mindmap summary of the novel and a written review will appear here after publication in April in the Eco de Sitges.)

Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence

 

Historical background

World War I (1914-18) was the first conflict in which more of the fighting was done with large machines (guns, tanks, and aeroplanes) than hand-to-hand combat. The novel frames machinery, bureaucracy and managerial culture as deprived of emotional or intellectual vitality, as they alienate people from their bodies, from one another, and from the land. On the other hand the book idealises nature and craft as restorative. Physical labour and sensual contact with the earth offer an antidote to the sterility of modern mechanical life. The war also killed millions and wounded millions more. Clifford Chatterley's crippled body reflects this widespread reality of personal injury.

After WWI the coal industry moved from wartime prominence into a prolonged phase of economic difficulty, industrial conflict and uneven modernisation. Wartime revival and postwar reorganisation processes drove deep and lasting social change in Britain’s mining communities. Gender roles shifted and men and women interacted more openly. Some people pursued more hedonistic activities and spurned settling down in a career or marriage. 

Literary context

World War I shattered Victorian certainties, and Lawrence responded by exploring human intimacy and emotional regeneration to counter a mechanised, dehumanising society. This focus on bodily experience and nature aligns him with a Romantic revival. However, his concern with the interior life of his characters also placed him in dialogue with Modernist currents and the possibility of personal regeneration in a fragmented post-war world.

In Lady Chatterley's lover Lawrence blended the psychological realism of his characters with lyrical pastoral passages and shared Modernism's preoccupation with alienation and interiority. Penguin book's 1960 legal victory against a Victorian interpretation of obscenity marked a liberalisation of publishing standards and placed Lawrence’s work at the centre of debates over artistic freedom and morality.

Summary 

Discussion

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not only a criticism of traditional views of sexuality but also of class snobbery, the mechanisation of life by industry and abstract thinking instead of physical relationships. The novel horrified 1928 post-Victorian readers in a similar way that WW1 had shocked the nation. It wasn’t published in the UK until 1960, after Penguin Books won an obscenity trial.

Lawrence builds his plot through multiple viewpoints and maintains a coherent storyline by using an omniscient narrator to relate what different characters are thinking. This approach to telling the story is reminiscent of the psychological perspective adopted by Modernist writers such as Woolf and Joyce and it contrasts sharply with the focus of Victorian novelists on social issues. However, the question remains as to how far the male author has achieved realistic insights into the most intimate feelings and sensations of his principal female character.

The novelist constructs the book’s themes using antithesis. The natural woodlands and flowers which Connie and the Mellors walk through are often compared to the dirty local coalpits where the miners’ lives are mechanised and dehumanised: Nature wins in its comparison with Industry. The sexual relationship between her ladyship and the gamekeeper also contradicts the traditional separation of classes in previous times. Connie goes further and, in a socialist outburst, criticises her husband’s snobbish presumption as a “class ruler”. The couple are divided on both social and political outlooks. These are Modernist blows to solid Victorian values.

In his book Lawrence reflects briefly on the novel as a social tool. Having presented village gossips Mrs. Bolton and Bertha Couts in a bad light, he warns that contemporary novels based on gossip lead to vices. He then suggests that his work aims to inform and lead to new life. This can be interpreted as a declaration of war on traditional values.

At heart this is a story of romance where love prevails over class, social respectability and wealth. It’s the Modernist triumph of the individual over social pressures and a woman over patriarchy.

To the Lighthouse by V. Woolf

 

Historical background

Massive destruction and a a huge number of victims were left behind by World War I. The Bloomsbury Group (among whom were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey) were pacifists. War was one of the occurrences Woolf said couldn’t be described but in her diary she detailed the events of the war, including air strikes, casualties, and sinking ships. The “huge events already developing across the water are looming over us too closely and too massively to be worked [in] without a terrible jolt in the perspective,” she remarked of the war. This change of viewpoint is evidenced in her narrative technique.

Women in Britain filled various domestic roles while the men were at war. After the conflict women were unwilling to withdraw because they had gained ground in society beyond the home, including rights and a voice. This raised the feminist voice in the UK and its echoes are heard in Woolf's novel.

Literary context

As a literary movement, Modernism is characterised by its rejection of prior literary traditions through innovations in form and content. Modernist authors radically shifted their attention from external events to human psychology through the method of personal narrative. They discarded chronological development by building plotless narratives and they experimented with language forms. To the Lighthouse embraces all these modernist hallmarks and represents a complete breakaway from traditional conventions of the novel genre. Woolf intended that her new form serve better the aims of exploring the meaning of human existence, which, in her opinion, was the sole purpose of literature and which the conventional novel form could not accommodate.

Bertrand Russell’s philosophical work on the relation between words and the world helps explain Woolf’s interest in how language fails or succeeds in capturing inner life. Woolf dramatises the limits of language through interior monologue and moments where meaning is “shown” rather than stated. (e.g. Mrs. Ramsay can't explicitly tell her husband she loves him, but he knows that through her behaviour.) This harmonises with Woolf's narration which knits meaning and form as a unity.

The war’s devastating effects, including the deaths of family members and the desolation of the Ramsays’ lives and home, are discussed in the novel's second section, “Time Passes.” This chapter acts as a transition between prewar and postwar. It embodies Woolf’s “indescribable” through its fused approach of time, narrative distance, dramatic metaphor, and understatement of death. In this way Woolf also synthesises content and form in her novel.

Summary

Discussion

After World War I had bombed Victorian certainties to pieces, Modernist artists struggled to re-establish some meaning to life. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is part of such an effort, focused on the fragility of existence. Woolf presents it to the reader as an experience by creating a narrative where multiple characters give their points of view. Readers hear these individuals' thoughts blended with the voice of a third-person narrator, allowing us to experience their distinctive inner worlds. These assorted perceptions fragment the storyline, offering a fictional participation in the splintered Modernist vision of postwar existence.

Woolf structures the novel in three parts. In The Window we get a story within the story when Mrs. Ramsay reads comforting tales to James by the window. This reflects the mother's own meditation on life as we read her inner thoughts about her relationships. As the main narrator she is our window on the novel's world. It turns out to be a passing vision, like that from a moving train window or the brief beam from the lighthouse stroking the house window. When Mrs. Ramsay unexpectedly passes away so does her vision, and the reader is left slightly orphaned through the loss of the predominant narrator.

In chapter 2, Times passes, the omniscient narrator reveals two more sudden deaths: Andrew by a bomb splinter in the war and Prue in childbirth. Time not only elapses, but leaves behind a lesson of fragility. To underline the idea this second section describes how the holiday house gradually decays and the reader witnesses how it falls into a shabby ruin of itself. The last section, To the Lighthouse, is narrated mainly by Lily Briscoe who returns to the repaired house and paints a seascape while remembering Mrs. Ramsay. Her canvas is another window on the scene in an attempt to capture the meaning of life through art following Mrs. Ramsay’s insight: "Life, stand still here".

The language throughout the text is more poetry than prose in its rhythmic narration accompanied by chorus repetitions of certain phrases. It echoes Lily's paint strokes as well as the cadence of the sea, the outside reality on the other side of the window.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, February 2026)