It has become axiomatic that First World War literature was disenchanted, or disillusioned, and returning combatants were unable to process or communicate that experience. In Writing disenchantment, Andrew Frayn argues that this was not just about the war: non-combatants were just as disenchanted as those who fought, and writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf produced some of the sharpest criticisms. Its language already existed in contemporary sociological and historical accounts of the problems of mass culture and the modern city, whose structures contained the conflict and were...