Richard Aldington, Images of War (1919) and Death of a Hero (1929)

Frayn, Andrew

Abstract

Richard Aldington is a distinctive and underrated writer. His Imagist poetry and his coruscating First World War novel Death of a Hero (1929) have continued to receive scholarly attention, but from the first assessments he has tended to be diminished by comparison to canonical modernists (Hughes 1931). Aldington was an important figure in the development and dissemination of literary modernism, and one of very few English high modernist authors. His writing about the war is both emotionally powerful and formally innovative. While there are substantial differences in form, tone and scale, Aldington returned in his great war novel to images and language he had previously used in poetry, particularly in describing bodies and landscapes (Gates 1979).

Citation

Frayn, A. (2021). Richard Aldington, Images of War (1919) and Death of a Hero (1929). In R. Schneider, & J. Potter (Eds.), Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War (183-195). Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110422467-009

• Acceptance Date: May 10, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Sep 20, 2021
• Publication Date: Sep 20, 2021
• Deposit Date: Sep 5, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 21, 2022
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Pages: 183-195
• Book Title: Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War
• Chapter Number: 8
• ISBN: 9783110426670
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110422467-009
• Keywords: Bodies, Englishness, modernism, masculinity, satire
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2912336
• Publisher URL: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110422467/html?lang=en