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.

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• Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism