Richard Aldington’s Images, the Metropolis and the Masses.

Richard Aldington’s city poems in the latter part of his 1915 collection Images are concerned with the masses who inhabit the modern city. Aldington is at pains to stress his distinction from those he perceives as an increasingly homogenized crowd. This paper examines the literary, linguistic and rhetorical strategies by which Aldington ‘others’ the masses, and sets them in the context of contemporary studies of the crowd, focusing on the work of Gustave Le Bon and C. F. G. Masterman. Aldington’s poetry is a product of the environment he sees as unsatisfactory, but he searches for solutions in a range of literary traditions which write the city.

This battle was not over: Parade’s End as a transitional text in the development of ‘disenchanted’ First World War literature.

This chapter argues that the novels of Ford's Parade's End tetralogy occupy a significant place in the development of "disenchanted" fiction about the First World War. The values of Ernest Raymond's patriotic Tell England are contrasted with those of C. E Montague's Disenchantment, providing a brief synopsis of the early 1920s response to the conflict. Parade's End is seen as introducing several key themes in to the post-First World War discursive field, including national identity, psychology, memory, and time. The presentation of these aligned with the formal aspects of the novel, allows it to push the boundaries of the readerly horizon of expectations. Frayn argues that Ford's readership, though moderately-sized, was influential from a literary point of view, and thus facilitated the reception of later, more vitriolic, criticisms of war.