Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism

This article approaches the narration of catastrophe by focusing on the aerial bombing of cities during the Second World War as represented in German, French, and British modernist novels. It makes two claims. First, of all the literary modes available for representing bombing as a catastrophic event, modernism seems to be the most adequate for conveying its complexity and multiple dimensions. Second, the modernism of experimental works on aerial bombing is a function of the catastrophe that they depict. For this reason, this paper argues for the existence of a catastrophic modernism; its main family resemblances are analyzed throughout its pages.