The Incest Plot: Melancholic Nationalism in H.D.’s Kora and Ka and Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night

Like Tender Is the Night, H.D.’s neglected story Kora and Ka was published in 1934 and explores the intersection of war, incest, and national identity. Placing H.D.’s story alongside Fitzgerald’s novel challenges our understanding of the novel as a meditation on its author’s (and Dick Diver’s) disillusionment with U.S. nationalism. Through their incest plots, the two works reveal a complex postwar condition in which melancholia, or unresolvable grief, sustains patriotism.