British Popular Culture and the First World War

Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-90-04-16658-5
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 48, 368 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 791 g

Reihe: History of Warfare

Much of the scholarship examining British culture of the First World War focusses on the 'high' culture of a limited number of novels, memoirs, plays and works of art, and the cultural reaction to them. This collection, by focussing on the cultural forms produced by and for a much wider range of social groups, including veterans, women, museum visitors and film goers, greatly expands the debate over how the war was represented by participants and the meanings ascribed to it in cultural production. Showcasing the work of both established academics and emerging scholars of the field, this book covers aspects of British popular culture from the material cultures of food and clothing to the representational cultures of literature and film. The result is an engaging and invigorating re-examination of the First World War and its place in British culture.
Contributors are: Keith Grieves, Rachel Duffett, Jane Tynan, Krisztina Robert, Lucy Noakes, Stella Moss, Carol Acton, Douglas Higbee, John Pegum, Eugene Michail, Victoria Stewart, Virginie Renard, Claudia Sternberg, Richard Espley and Stephen Badsey.

Erratum
Introduction, Jessica Meyer, page 11 in the first sentence of the second paragraph, for 'talke' read 'talk.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meyer, Jessica

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Militärgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder England, UK, Irland: Regional & Stadtgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1) Introduction
Jessica Meyer

I. Trench Cultures
2) The Propinquity of Place: home, landscape and soldier poets of the Great War
Keith Grieves
3) A War Unimagined: Food, memory and the rank and file soldier
Rachel Duffett
4) 'Tailoring in the Trenches': Production and consumption of First World War British army uniform
Jane Tynan

II. Women and Culture
5) 'All That is Best of the Modern Woman?': Representations of paramilitary women war workers in British popular culture, 1914-1938
Krisztina Robert
6) 'Play at Being Soldiers'? British women, fashion and military uniform in the First World War
Lucy Noakes
7) 'Wartime Hysterics': Alcohol, women and the politics of wartime social purity
Stella Moss
8) Best Boys and Aching Hearts: the rhetoric of romance as social control in magazines for young women
Carol Acton

III. Memorial Cultures
9) The British Veterans Movement, 1917-1921
Douglas Higbee
10) The Old Front Line: Returning to the battlefields in the writings of ex-servicemen
John Pegum
11) 'A Sting of Remembrance!': Collective memory and its forgotten armies
Eugene Michail
12) The Last War: The legacy of the First World War in 1940s British Fiction
Victoria Stewart

IV. Cultures of Memory
13) 'Reaching out to the Past': Memory in Contemporary British First World War Narratives
Virginie Renard
14) Popular Mnemonics of the First World War: The Unknown Soldier and Distant Bridges
Claudia Sternberg
15) 'How much of an 'experience' do we want the public to receive?': Trench reconstruction and popular images of the Great War
Richard Espley
16) 'If It Had Happened Otherwise': First World War exceptionalism in counterfactual history
Stephen Badsey

Über Autor(innen)

Jessica Meyer received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2005. She has published several articles on topics including shell shock, understandings of masculinity and popular British literature. She is currently working on a project examining the relationship between work and masculinity in Britain during the First World War.