This chapter turns its attention to the first years of the Great War. Commencing with a reading of James’s wartime correspondence, its first half charts how the aging author was tormented, in the latter stages of 1914, by the possibility that his life and works might be subjected to retroactive disavowal in light of the conflict he never saw coming. It then discusses two of James’s wartime works, The Middle Years (1917) and The Sense of the Past (1917), focusing on how these texts engage with and reflect upon the prospect of undoing and recasting formative experiences. In its second half, the chapter zooms out slightly and offers a broader investigation of the wartime critical climate within which James’s acts of creative self-interrogation took place. Noting that as the conflict raged on, authors and critics alike became caught up in debates about the purpose of reading in wartime, the chapter draws on Rebecca West’s reviews of James from 1915 and 1916 and analyses her Jamesian novel, The Return of the Solider (1918), to explore the psychological and ethical pressures that were placed on another form of counterfactual consolation: the world into which we can escape through fiction.

This chapter addresses two works set in post-war Japan: Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story ‘The Summer After the War’ (1983) and novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986). It begins with a survey of various forces (legal, social, and political) which convinced contemporary commentators that moral sense had been left bewildered and judgements rendered ephemeral by the events of the Second World War and early Cold War, and then goes on to trace how this crisis of faith influenced the style and ethical consciousness of Ishiguro’s early fiction. Together ‘The Summer After the War’ and An Artist of the Floating World display a powerful interest in those Japanese citizens who flourished in a society operating with transient and ultimately dangerous values, and whose lives were threatened and emptied of meaning following their nation’s defeat. The chapter contains close readings of both texts and shows how subtle stylistic features contribute to their presentation of individuals endeavouring, through imaginative acts of narration, to attain absolution and stability in the face of changing moral norms and shifting geopolitical alliances.

This chapter focuses on two of Elizabeth Bowen’s works – a semi-autobiographical play, ‘A Year I Remember – 1918’ (1949), and a novel, A World of Love (1955) – which register a phenomenon that historian Katherine Holden has termed ‘imaginary widowhood’. This psychological coping mechanism, encouraged by newspaper headlines, political speeches, and educators in the interwar years, allowed Britain’s two million ‘surplus’ women to view themselves not as shameful spinsters, but as those who had lost their rightful husbands in the Great War. The first half of the chapter charts competing representations of unmarried women in the early twentieth century and notes the attention paid to ‘imaginary widowhood’ in both Bowen’s The Hotel (1927) and ‘A Year I Remember – 1918’. Concluding with A World of Love, the chapter ends by arguing that Bowen’s long-term interest in this type of consolatory counterfactual produced a tonally complex mid-century novel, whose formal exploration of the imaginative and conceptual limits of traditional literary plots echoes the struggle of its two heroines as they weigh up the benefits of continuing to see themselves as the would-be widows of a long-dead soldier.

This final chapter engages with the difficulty of thinking about imaginative mechanisms as ‘I’-saving in the wake of the Holocaust, arguably the century’s most devasting act of mass murder. It offers a close reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and locates its conflicted defence of the imagination within the complex legacy of Theresienstadt: a Nazi concentration camp where inmates were encouraged to participate in cultural activities and carry on their pre-war professions in the hope that their example might trick the outside world into thinking that Europe’s Jews were not in danger. The chapter not only argues for Ishiguro’s indebtedness to two major accounts of that infamous site: H. G. Adler’s historical study Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community and W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz. It also contends that Never Let Me Go registers, with arresting power, how knowledge of the combination of suffering, deception, and creativity that took place inside Theresienstadt’s walls has challenged ideas about the value of art and the ethics of attempting to console or distract persecuted populations

This chapter focuses on examples of Henry James’s post-1890 writings – including Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), the Prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and ‘Maud-Evelyn’ (1900) – which engage with, or themselves embody, the challenge of commemorating lives cut short prematurely or traumatically. The first half addresses formal and stylistic features and explores how James’s commitment to conserving and commemorating the unspent experiential potential of the dead of the American Civil War manifests within his late aesthetics: informing syntax, notions of character, and the pressure placed on traditional narrative structures. The subsequent sections then trace a competing phenomenon, inspired in part by the author’s meditations on Civil War Monuments: the concern that several of James’s late works (both fictional and non-fictional) display about the wisdom of investing emotionally in the unlived lives of the untimely dead. Together, these sections argue that, during the last twenty-five years of his life, James produced writings at once enthralled by and wary of unfulfilled narrative potential, and attentive to how it might be used to bind epochs together.

This chapter engages with Bowen’s writings of the Second World War. It explores how these texts responded to the narratives, myths, and lies fed to Britons to maintain wartime morale and to aid the transformation, in the immediate post-war period, of traumatic and discontinuous experiences into palatable histories. The chapter begins with Bowen’s wartime autobiographical works, Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters (1942), both of which register anxieties about how personal experiences and recollections may be disputed by the assertions of historical accounts. These works are then discussed in relation to comparable concerns which emerged in the final months of the Second World War, once news of the Holocaust began to challenge both narratives which had stressed the terrible conditions endured in Britain and the scepticism many civilians had professed about reports of Nazi atrocities. Central to this argument is a reading of Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949): a post-war novel that links the painful forms of retrospective censure suffered by its heroine to questions circulating in this period about personal responsibility and the limits of judgement.

This Introduction offers a survey of how criticism to date has conceived of the relationship between mass violence and the creative imagination, arguing that little has been done to destabilise the view that when literary works take the destruction of bodies, minds, and ideals in times of war seriously, they find their structures and surfaces warped. Identifying Jay Winter’s pioneering work in the field of cultural history as running counter to this trend, it positions this study as likewise animated by a belief that the wars of the last century not only sparked aesthetic experiments and the abandonment of traditional imaginative structures; they also impelled forms of creative counterfactual thinking whose aims were reparative, preservatory, and consolatory. The concepts of ‘unlived lives’ and ‘lives unlived’ (which will be used to explore various imaginative modes of resistance to violence, loss, and change) are defined. The book’s aims are situated relative to the ethos of the ‘new modernist studies’ and its place periodisation debate explained. The combination of historical, biographical, and close readings deployed in the six chapters to come are given careful justification – as is the selection of Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as the book’s central writers.