Mobilizing Cultural Identities in the First World War: History, Representations and Memory

✍ Scribed by Federica Pedriali, Cristina Savettieri

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 240
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book tackles cultural mobilization in the First World War as a plural process of identity formation and de-formation. It explores eight different settings in which individuals, communities and conceptual paradigms were mobilized. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it interrogates one of the most challenging facets of the history of the Great War, one that keeps raising key questions on the way cultures respond to times of crisis. Mobilization during the First World War was a major process of material and imaginative engagement unfolding on a military, economic, political and cultural level, and existing identities were dramatically challenged and questioned by the whirl of discourses and representations involved.

✦ Table of Contents

Preface
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Part I: Political Identities
Chapter 2: Classical Idealism and Political Action in the First World War: Jane Malloch and Henry Brailsford
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Part One: Identity-Formation
2.2.1 Posthumous Reputations
2.2.2 Early Years
2.2.3 Undergraduate Classicists
2.3 Part Two: Classics and Political Action Before WWI
2.3.1 The Brailsfords in Greece (1897–1903)
2.3.2 The Brailsfords in London (1904–1913)
2.4 Part Three: The Brailsfords in WWI
2.4.1 Brailsford versus Murray on the War
2.4.2 Malloch’s War
2.5 Conclusion
References
Unpublished Material
Chapter 3: Artists at War: Artistic Identities and the Politics of Culture in Post-World War I Italy
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Ardengo Soffici and Rete mediterranea: A Portrait of the Artist as a Veteran
3.3 Carlo Carrà and the War: From Metaphysical Painting to Artistic “Italianism”
3.4 Conclusion
References
Part II: Italian Masculinities
Chapter 4: “The Genuine Family of My Extraordinary Youth”: Male Bonding in the Italian Literature of the First World War
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Similarities and Uniqueness: Italian War Writers and the First World War
4.3 Intimacy and Nostalgia: Male Comradeship
References
Chapter 5: Gender Trouble in Italian Narratives of Captivity of the First World War
5.1 Introduction
5.2 An Emasculated Nation
5.3 Images of Captivity in the Public Discourse: Stigma and Exploitation
5.4 Subordinated Masculinity in Personal Writings
5.5 Conclusion
References
Part III: Conceptual Frameworks
Chapter 6: Women, Heroism and the First World War
6.1 Introduction: Defining Heroism
6.2 Women and the Heroic Tradition
6.3 Supporters Behind the Front Line
6.4 Carers at the Front
6.5 Warriors, Spies and Public Reaction
6.6 The Female Hero in Peacetime
6.7 Conclusion: Reappraising Heroism
References
Chapter 7: Bared and Grievable: Theory Impossible in No Man’s Land
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Distant Premises
7.3 Escalation Man
7.4 “To Our Enemies”
7.5 Destination No Man’s Land
7.6 Exploding the Thought Conclusively (Lat. Explaudere—To Drive Out, Hiss Off, Hoot Off)
References
Part IV: Remembering
Chapter 8: Croatia and the First World War: National Forgetting in a Memorial Shatter Zone?
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Croatia’s First World War
8.3 The Memory Tradition: Croatian War Memories in Yugoslavia
8.4 National Forgetting in Post-Yugoslav Croatia
8.5 2014: Eruption of First World War Memory in the Memorial Shatter Zone?
8.6 Conclusion: “Memory Tectonics” and the First World War in Croatia’s “Memorial Shatter Zone”
References
Chapter 9: Witnessing the First World War in Britain: The Making of Modern Identities During the Centenary
9.1 Introduction
9.2 Witnessing the First World War
9.3 Forming Political Witnesses to the War
9.4 Making Moral Witnesses to the War
9.5 Creating Social Witnesses to the War
9.6 Conclusion
References
Index