Dixmude and Postcards

Impressive belfry

The impressive belfry, with town hall, of Dixmude in Belgium is situated between the two wings of the city hall.
The first city hall dates from 1425 and was extended in 1567. In the 19th century, a new neo-Gothic building arose, designed by architect Louis Delacenserie of Bruges. This monumental building with stairs tower was completely devastated during the First World War. Between 1920 and 1929 it was reconstructed by Valentin Vaerwijck, an architect from Ghent.

Postcards from the Trenches

In contrast with the belfry of Dixmude is modernist architecture. In Postcards from the Trenches, Allyson Booth traces the complex relationship between British Great War culture and modernist literature and architecture. By drawing on a wide range of materials and attending to the places where they overlap, Allyson Booth uncovers ways in which modernism is deeply embedded in a broader Great War culture.

Modernist description of buildings

Allyson Booth links, for example, the modernist representation of an unstable self to soldiers' familiarity with corpses, the modernist mistrust for fact to the competing nationalist discourses of August 1914, and the modernist description of buildings as having shaken off the past to a desire to forget the war.

Modernism

Allyson Booth argues that the dislocations of war often figure centrally in modernist forms even when the war itself seems peripheral to modernist content. Thus she suggests that soldiers experienced the Great War as strangely modernist and that modernism itself is strangely haunted by the Great War.

Postcards from the Trenches

Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War by Allyson Booth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195102118