I propose to revisit the divide that is typically agreed upon when considering the history of realism in the 20th and early 21st century. When we look in closer detail at the evolution of representation in the prose of the early 20th century and divest ourselves of the consensual narrative of modernist writing as rejecting mimesis and realism, we realise that many instances of what is commonly regarded as ‘modernist’ writing in fact never relinquished the mimetic impulse. In contrast to the traditional academic discourse which claims that the First World War played a major role in the breakdown of realism, I argue that the reverse was often true. Writers who had a direct frontline experience certainly felt compelled to renew the techniques they were developing before 1914, but this renewal did not lead to a renunciation of realism: the war experience fostered a reinvention of the relationship between literature and reality. Although concerned with the Holocaust, Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘traumatic realism’ (2000) fully applies to WWI writing: these authors felt compelled to strive for a revivified and deepened mimetic mode precisely as they were interrogating the limits of representation in the context of the war. They were largely doing so for ethical reasons: not only to bear witness, but to engage with issues of vulnerability and grievability. In the case of the war nurse, the choice of rendering the gruesome reality of the evacuation hospital also operates as a form of resistance to the totalising ‘ethos’ of state propaganda in which the materiality of the soldier’s wounded body or corpse is conveniently erased. My talk will first take a fresh look at Aristotle’s definition of the mimesis-muthos pair so as to disprove the conventional consideration of ‘modernist’ writing as anti-mimetic. Secondly, I will demonstrate that in literary testimonies of the First World War, the materiality of the experience is crucial in allowing the authors to develop a synaesthetic phenomenology of the war that relies on sensory experience. In this regard, these texts anticipate new materialism and current material-realist fiction. This bears particularly rich consequences when we look at women’s writing, as will be evidenced through Mary Borden’s engagement with the ‘entangled’ materiality of the ravaged environment and of the mutilated or dying body in The Forbidden Zone. The very concept of subject is interrogated in Borden’s fragments: this ontological questioning also has repercussions of an ideological and ethical nature. What I ultimately hope to demonstrate is how relevant our current considerations on ‘vibrant matter’ and ‘transcorporeality’ are to texts engaged with representing the crisis that largely contributed to the emergence of our contemporary world.