Santanu Das. Touch and Intimacy in First World War LiteratureTouch and Intimacy in First World War Literature by Santanu  DasReview by: David SilbeyJournal of British Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2 (April 2007), pp. 418-419Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on British StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/514371 .

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418 � BOOK REVIEWS

gressed. The midcentury wars, then, marked the beginning of a trend that culminated inthe levees en masse of later decades.

Taken together with similar assertions in his book on British society during the War ofAmerican Independence (1775–83), Conway’s work seems to constitute a comprehensive—and controversial—historical claim. If mass military service and widespread dislocationcausedby warfare was common in eighteenth-century Europe, the French Revolutionary and Na-poleonic wars were not unique or especially modern. This would clearly undermine the waymilitary historians have traditionally portrayed historical change. It would also affect broaderaccounts of modernization and the nature of modernity.

This book represents the work of a gifted historian in whom broad interests and enthu-siasms happily coincide with disciplined research and judicious analysis. British and militaryhistorians will have to confront its claims, as will students of national identity and stateformation. It will also interest scholars working in Atlantic history and eighteenth-centurystudies.

Timothy Feist, U.S. Naval Academy

SANTANU DAS. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005. Pp. 269. $80.00 (cloth).

Santanu Das, in his worthwhile Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, worksto analyze the “central importance of the sense of touch in the experience of the First WorldWar and its relation to literary representation” (5). That “sense of touch,” Das argues,pervades the literature of the First World War. His goal is to understand why that is so andalso understand how writers, men and women, soldiers and nurses, attempted to makelanguage equal to the task of chronicling the near-indescribable experience of the war. Das’seffort, as he points out, brings together two similar but distinct strands in the historiography:what might be called the literary strand, which examines how the soldiers and veterans ofWorld War I attempted to relate their experiences, and the memorialization strand, whichfocuses on how societies worked to remember (or not remember) the Great War. Thesemight also be called the “Paul Fussell” and “Jay Winter” strands, though that would neglecta number of other important practitioners.

Das, like Fussell, is particularly concerned with the muddy “slimescapes” of the trenches.But that is only a part of his analysis, for Das also looks at the other kinesthetic sensations,ranging from the constant experience of darkness to the almost tangible presence of soundand smell and even taste. More, Das examines the role of touch not simply between theterrain and those who lived on and in it, but the role of touch between soldiers, and betweensoldiers and nurses. Intimacy and touching were enforced by the geography of the trenches.They were indeed often welcomed, as soldiers tried to keep warm or safe in a hostileenvironment. They were sometimes demanded, as dying or wounded soldiers needed to beheld or kissed. In his analysis, Das pays particular attention to Wilfred Owen and IsaacRosenberg, both of whom aggressively plumbed the tactile world around them. Finally, Daslooks at the experience of nurses, usually middle- or upper-class women who had littleexperience of war or the male body before they went to the front. Their role as comforters,tenders, or mediators of wounded or dying soldiers, either in the wards or the operatingroom, provides a perspective that is different and distanced from the soldiers’ experiences.Das handles these analyses thoroughly and well, and the summary effect is to broaden anddeepen our understanding of how World War I was written and remembered.

But Das’s work is not without problems. He is, to a certain extent, captive of a datedperspective on the war, one that stresses a vision of stagnant futility on the Western Front.

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BOOK REVIEWS � 419

This has a number of effects. First, though the title lays claim to all of First World Warliterature, its focus is, in reality, much more limited. There are some German and Frenchvoices here, but they are dwarfed by the number of British accounts. The book pays littleor no attention to Russian or German experiences on the Eastern Front, Italian or Germanexperiences in the Italian front, Turkish experiences in the Middle East, or a host of othercountries and theaters. Second, even on the Western Front, Das pays attention almost entirelyto the middle years of the war, the years of stalemate. There is little in here about the muchmore mobile warfare of August–September 1914 or March–November 1918. Third, Das’streatment of women focuses entirely on those who were nurses. This is a defensible choice,given the focus of the book, but it echoes uncomfortably the tendency of the historiographyof women’s experience to be focused only on the women at home or those who were nurses.As Janet Watson (among others) has pointed out, women were much more than mothers,wives, or nurses. Finally, though Das effectively analyzes the way in which language aboutthe experiences of war was gendered, he does not bring the same careful sensitivity to adiscussion of either race or class. How did the Indian troops stationed on the Western Frontspeak of their experiences? Did they emphasize touch in the same way? How did working-class soldiers speak of their experiences? There is a tantalizing hint about this, when Dasspeaks of coal miners and how their underground life in the pits prefigured in many waystheir experiences in the trenches, but Das never mounts a sustained analysis of that working-class perspective.

These criticisms should not be taken to invalidate the worth of the book. Touch andIntimacy offers a smart, insightful, and well-written look at the “narratives produced bysoldier-writers and nurses who served in the war and for whom the immediate, materialcircumstances were drastically and often irrevocably changed” (231) and how touch, themost intimate of senses, was both a way of exploring the experiences and a necessity duringthose experiences. Ultimately, that look, despite the flaws, is a useful addition to our un-derstanding of the recollection and memorialization of World War I.

David Silbey, Alvernia College

MATTHEW DIMMOCK. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early ModernEngland. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. vii�207. $94.95 (cloth).

Matthew Dimmock’s New Turkes is a detailed study of the image of Islam and “Turks” insixteenth-century England. It unearths a wealth of primary sources that are analyzed withina carefully presented historical context. Dimmock avoids the pitfalls of cultural historianswho generalize from theory to text: instead, he approaches the texts through the lens ofthe political, religious, and military transformations of the sixteenth century. The book islucidly written and is happily unencumbered with the jargon that now infests studies onIslam and Europe in the early modern period. It belongs solidly to the recent scholarshipthat explores the role of Islamic civilization in the making of early modern Britain. AsDimmock observes, Islam and the Turk took “a central position in so many aspects ofEnglish life in the sixteenth century” (16).

Thematically, the book is in two parts: the first examines the presence of Islam intheological and polemical sources; the second focuses on Anglo-Ottoman relations in theElizabethan period and their impact on London drama, from The Battle of Alcazar tosome concluding observations on Othello. The first part, “The ‘Turke’ and ‘Turkishness’in England, 1529–1571,” ranges over a vast terrain, but Dimmock elucidates texts andpersonalities with clarity, always keeping the reader aware of the years in which his analysistakes place. He discusses Erasmus and Martin Luther, John Rastell, Thomas More and

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