Title: Absent yet Ubiquitous: The Writing of Body in British WWI Literature

Abstract: The body is both biological and social-cultural, both the object and the subject. Academically speaking, body studies in many disciplines are rapidly developing. War is an activity that undoubtedly exerts a great impact on the human body, yet the human body either during actual wars or as depicted in war literature so far has been understudied. This article examines how British WWI combat writers present the Great War’s dehumanization and objectification of the human body, and then analyzes how the combatants tried to construct the subjectivity of the human body and thus maintain the dignity and meaning as human beings.

Keywords: British WWI literature, the body, objectification, subjectivity

Author: Jinfeng Zhang, Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.