The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

This chapter sketches the contexts, both broadly historical and more narrowly cultural, for Hemingway’s life and work from the 1910s through the 1950s, including the wars he experienced and the literary scenes that his work both shaped and was shaped by.

This chapter follows Hemingway from his journalistic work in the early 1920s through the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926. Ambitious to write fiction that would be innovative and popular, Hemingway absorbed the influences of Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others as he adapted news stories into sketches and wrote short stories based on combat experience and on his youth. Hemingway’s early style grew in the rich soil of literary experimentation in Paris in the 1920s, where he encountered an international literary and artistic avant-garde. This earliest work exemplifies Hemingway’s experimentation and its relationship to his deep need to express the apparently inexpressible contents of his psyche and experience. The reception of his 1925 story collection In Our Time established his early reputation. This chapter’s reading of The Sun Also Rises emphasizes Hemingway’s ironic deployment of both received narrative conventions and religiously significant pilgrimage and ritual themes, which locates Hemingway in a crucial vein of literary modernism exemplified by Eliot’s The Waste Land. Like these other modernist works, Hemingway’s novel is immured in the social attitudes within which he worked; anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia tangle the novel’s surface texture but also shape its narrative structures.

Over the last five years of the 1920s, Hemingway worked assiduously to consolidate his reputation, publishing stories in mainstream magazines and developing what would become a lifelong relationship with the Charles Scribner publishing company. He worked to balance literary experimentation and innovation in the short story and the novel (sometimes courting censorship by challenging the canons of “decency”) and to appeal to popular taste. His second collection of stories includes the classic “Hills like White Elephants,” a powerfully concise exploration of power dynamics and competing visions within a romantic relationship. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway brings a corrosive irony to the topoi of the wartime romance, complicating received notions of both martial heroism (the military centerpiece of the novel is a shambolic retreat) and heterosexual romance (suggested in Frederic Henry’s and Catherine Barkley’s repeated references to wanting not only to be with one another but to be one another). The novel also sees Hemingway experiment with new modes such as stream-of-consciousness narration.

How did peat become part of Russia’s industrial metabolism? This chapter traces the physical mobilization of peat in the late imperial period and during the early Soviet electrification campaign, highlighting the importance of regional perspectives for efforts to write an environmental history of Russia’s industrializing economy. From the late nineteenth century, peat played an increasingly important role as an industrial fuel, inspiring technical elites to consider it a source of electric power. This idea was subsequently incorporated into the GOĖLRO-plan for the Electrification of Russia, which firmly anchored peat in the power industry. The early Soviet energy system, with its emphasis on regionally available energy sources, was not solely a product of Bolshevik power. Instead, it must be situated within longer trajectories of regionalized fuel use and the experience of a war-related fuel crisis that predated the 1917 Revolution.

Starting from the Russo-Japanese War until the height of the Cold War era, Schoenberg’s adult life coincided with various wars during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. This chapter explores how Schoenberg navigated these events by surveying his correspondences with friends and pupils, his own writings and brief analyses of two overtly political compositions, Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op. 41 (1942) and A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46 (1947). This chapter ends by considering the two war compositions as the composer’s statement and restatement against fascistic tendencies in Germany during World War II and, again, in the United States during the Cold War era.

In response to First World War propaganda campaigns and the emerging science of behaviorist psychology, which downplayed or even denied the existence of “mind” (understood as an agency directed by human cognition and will), American modernists performed the mind in and as writing: as a potentiating agent of mental plasticity to reshape habits, modifiy beliefs and behaviors, and dramatize the strategies by which consent is “manufactured.” An American modernist literary “aesthetics of exposure” sought to arrest habitual thought by exposing the behaviorist strategies of conditioning behavior and regimenting beliefs. The major works examined in this chapter – Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and John Dos Passos’ the U.S.A trilogy (1936) – deploy strategies of psychological and textual fracture and fragmentation in order to make state-sponsored propaganda technique visible and available for critique.

The conclusion summarises the main findings of the book and tentatively goes beyond them. When it comes to thought and practice of fin-de-siècle colonial war and violence, we should emphasise essential comparability and connectivity instead of national particularities among the British, German and Dutch empires. It is suggested this research finding might apply to other Western colonial empires as well. At the same time, a number of smaller aspects in which we might actually find national differences is noted. Taking up the transimperial mobility of ideas and experiences of colonial warfare noted throughout the book, the conclusion then asks what questions these findings raise for thinking about the temporality and spatiality of empires more generally. Finally, it touches on continuities in war and violence beyond 1914, both in later colonial wars as well as in the fighting of the First World War in Europe. It tentatively suggests that continuities were considerable in the first case and much lower in the second case.

Literary modernism cognitivizes the gothic by engaging the counter-conversionary energies that James associated with the sick-soul’s awareness of the human potential for evil. Where psychological commentary on the First World War’s aftermath typically concerns “shell-shock,” this chapter highlights the period’s equal investment in the cognitively rehabilitative potentialities of modernist “techniques of dissociation” to disrupt dangerous excesses of affect and forestall identification with fascistic beliefs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), demonstrate how the various information streams—song lyrics, social commentary, and newspaper publicity—haunt their protagonists, producing self-estranging varieties of dissociation characteristic of the Jamesean sick soul, wherein soul-sickness indicates both a recognition of and resistance to dehumanizing beliefs.

In 1911, Italians living abroad constituted one-sixth of Italy’s population, numbering roughly five million people. However, the experiences of emigrant communities have not been incorporated into the narrative of Italy’s war. This chapter discusses the place of migration within the historiography of the First World War and of the war within migration history. It introduces the cohort of 300,000 emigrant soldiers who returned to Italy to complete their conscripted military service during the war, a mass mobilisation which was a uniquely Italian phenomenon. Scholars are divided as to whether this should be regarded as a success or a failure: I argue it is remarkable that so many made the journey considering that, in most locations, there were no coercive measures obliging them to do so. The chapter lays out the global micro-history approach adopted in the book and the decision to focus on four emigrant soldiers, each typical and atypical in different respects: Americo Orlando in São Paulo, Esterino Alessandro Tarasca in New York, Cesare Bianchi in London and Lazzaro Ponticelli in Paris.

This chapter explores Hitler’s role in the Nazi Party, with a particular focus on Hitler’s relationship to antisemitism. It carefully examines the evidence concerning Hitler’s views towards Jews, and argues forcefully for the emergence in the 1920s of a vision that was already at least implicitly genocidal and certainly murderous. It thus makes a forceful case both for continuity in Hitler’s ideas leading to the Holocaust, and for the primacy of his vision in determining the later policy towards Jews adopted by the Nazi regime.

This chapter explores the rise of inter-ethnic tensions and violence in large parts of Europe in the wake of the First World War through to Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor. Although tensions between aspiring nationalist movements and their imperial overlords had been on the rise from the latter third of the nineteenth century onwards, it was the Great War, the implosion of Europe’s land empires and the proliferation of revolutionary movements of the left and right that created the spaces in which violence became possible. Surveying the situation in different European countries – from Russia in the east to Ireland in the west – the chapter analyzes different patterns and logics of violence that emerged long before the Nazis were a serious political force. Without wanting to exaggerate the role of pre−1933 violence as a precursor to the Holocaust, it is clear that the Nazis’ ever-radicalizing policies against the Jews and other minorities did not come out of nowhere. The Great War had raised, but not solved, many of the issues that allowed Nazism to become a dominant force in German politics in the first place.

The First World War was the first large-scale industrial war which saw its belligerents grapple with modernity. By the beginning of 1918 the British were faced with a particularly challenging strategic picture. Their Russian partners had withdrawn from the war and were negotiating a settlement with the Central Powers. The French were recovering from a series of strikes which fuelled British concern over how worn out the French Army might be. The Italians were regrouping after a devastating attack by the Central Powers at Caporetto. While the United States had entered the war on the side of the Entente, they were arriving too slowly to reassure their partners that they could tip the balance of the war in the Entente’s favour in the near term.

The central argument of this book is that the First World War catalysed the transformation of an integrated art milieu, previously shaped by upper-class art patrons, into divided and highly nationalised art markets driven by capitalist incentives of investment and speculation. Discourses on ‘art profiteers’, art looting in war zones, large-scale confiscations, and attempts to use expropriated art to alleviate national exchange rate crises are all phenomena that can be traced back to 1914. This year also marked the start of a nationalisation process that would lead to the decline of the international ‘collecting class’ that had shaped the trade in art in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The seeds of the contemporary dominance of Anglophone auction markets were sown during the First World War, laying the foundation for the ‘modern market’ to emerge as a financial entity.

This chapter analyses the auction milieu’s cultural responses to war-induced developments. Within societies deeply entrenched in the mentality of mobilisation and sacrifice, the commercialisation of art stirred moral apprehensions, feelings of possession, and envy, both among the general public and within the art industry. Debates on nouveaux riches and profiteers underscored the construction of antagonist figures during the war, highlighting threats to the market from both external and internal forces. The widespread destruction of heritage also catalysed nationalist feelings, deepening the cultural fragmentation of a formerly integrated trade sphere. By scrutinising the biographies of dealers, examining art’s vulnerability in wartime upheaval, and exploring the interplay between art and finance, this chapter also outlines how the war acted on the tensions characteristic of each market and brought them to a conflagration.