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The ghost of philosophical nihilism lingered over the modernist landscape like a dank fog that refused to lift. [1] Literary figures of the time observed this nihilistic atmosphere, with Elliot Paul declaring in his essay “The New Nihilism” (1927) that after the Great War, “old values had become meaningless” and in his introduction to “A War Diary” (1915–1918), Herbert Read recalling that “nihilism—nothingness, despair” was literary modernism’s “universal state of mind.” [2] This disintegration...
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