Mourning ModernismMourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W. G. Sebald, Mourning Modernism engages the centurys signal preoccupation with world ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous