British Culture and the First World War: Experience, Representation and Memory

✍ Scribed by Toby Thacker

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 371
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The First World War has been mythologized since 1918, and many paradigmatic views of it - that it was pointless, that brave soldiers were needlessly sacrificed - are deeply embedded in the British consciousness. More than in any other country, these collective British memories were influenced by the experiences and the work of writers, painters and musicians.
This book revisits the British experience of the War through the eyes and ears of a diverse group of carefully selected novelists, poets, composers and painters. It examines how they reacted to and portrayed their experiences in the trenches on the Western Front, in distant theatres of war and on the home front, in words, pictures and music that would have a profound influence on subsequent British perceptions of the war.
Rupert Brooke, Vera Brittain, Christopher Nevinson, Paul Nash, Edward Elgar and T. E. Lawrence are amongst the figures discussed in this original exploration of the First World War and British collective memory. The book includes illustrations, maps and a companion website to aid further study and research.

✦ Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Introduction
Chapter 1 ‘The blessings of peace’
The artists
Chapter 2 August 1914
Engagement or inertia: the challenge for individuals
The BEF in France and Belgium
Chapter 3 The call to arms
Purpose and exhilaration
Nevinson witnesses ‘the Shambles’
Conscience, duty and patriotism
Reactions to atrocity
War in the Middle East
Responses to the war
Chapter 4 January–June 1915
Intimations of mortality
Boredom and bereavement
Social divisions emerge
First challenges of representation
Memory and mourning
Chapter 5 July–December 1915
Love in wartime
Not danger but drudgery
The demand for conscription
Deepening problems
Chapter 6 January–September 1916
New hope in the Middle East: the Arab Revolt
Modernist representations; and the prosaic reality
The war spreads
Mametz Wood
Love, gratitude, resignation and chastening
The fading romance of war
Chapter 7 September 1916–July 1917
A different war: train-wrecking and guerilla warfare in the Hejaz
Service in Macedonia and Malta
Conscripts arrive at the front
Official War Artists
Fight for Right?
A crisis of representation?
Chapter 8 August–December 1917
Objectivity, realism or propaganda?
Consolation in Palestine?
Between celebration and regret: the challenge to representation grows
Disillusion
Chapter 9 January–July 1918
Mechanization and brutality: changing warfare in the Middle East
Infantryman or Official War Artist?
Votes for women, and the Americans arrive
Visions of heroism and chivalry
Censorship
Nash’s vision of a new world
Britain’s darkest hour
Chapter 10 August–November 1918
Into darkness
Final blows
Spencer’s trial by ordeal
The end comes
Chapter 11 1919–23
The creation of a legend
Coming to terms with the new world
Painting and remembrance
Living with trauma
Chapter 12 ‘We will remember them’
Heroism, justice, disillusionment and redemption
Lawrence and Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Vera Brittain’s Testament
Spencer and resurrection
David Jones and In Parenthesis
Elgar and Parry
Recent developments
Conclusion
Notes
Archival Sources, Newspapers, Journals and Magazines
Further Reading
Index