Be a Good Soldier

'Be a Good Soldier will command excitement and respect for its first-calibre, strikingly original readings of grief and mourning in a truly impressive variety of modernist texts. Jennifer Margaret Fraser's meticulous work of scholarship and criticism crucially stands on its own, blending and cross-considering textual domains with agility and inventiveness. Fraser has generated an exceptionally rich and sensitive repository of vocabulary through which historicist inquiry can now most productively happen.' -- Peter Mallios, Department of English, University of Maryland

Be a Good Soldier initiates conversation on the figure of the child in modernist novels, investigating the demand for emotional suppression as manifested later in cruelty and aggression in adulthood.

In the modern era, children experiencing grief were encouraged to dry their tears and ‘be good soldiers.’ How was this phenomenon interrogated and deconstructed in the period's literature? Be a Good Soldier initiates conversation on the figure of the child in modernist novels, investigating the demand for emotional suppression as manifested later in cruelty and aggression in adulthood.

Jennifer Margaret Fraser provides sophisticated close readings of key works by Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, among others who share striking concerns about the concept of infantry — both as a collection of infants, and as foot soldiers of war. A phenomenon associated traditionally with Freud, Fraser instead uses a unique, Derridean theoretical prism to provide new ways of understanding modernist concerns with power dynamics, knowledge, and meaning. Be a Good Soldier establishes a pioneering, nuanced vocabulary for further historical and cultural inquiries into modernist childhood.