The Great War and the Nation
Questions to prepare for seminar:
- Do we see a shift in the nature of patriotism in the literature and culture of the Great War?
- How did World War I impact upon gender relations in Britain?
- What do efforts to memorialise the Great War reveal about the unity (or disunity) of the nation?
- Why has the First World War had such a prominent and persistent place within national memory in Britain?
Core Reading:
- Gullace, Nicoletta F., 'White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Great War', Journal of British Studies, 36:2 (1987),
- Ted Bogacz, '"A Tyranny of Words" Language, Poetry and Anti-Modernism in England in the First World War', Journal of Modern History, 58 (1986), pp. 643-68
Further Reading:
- Many commentators have seen the trauma of the industrialised Great War of 1914-18 as a fundamental fault-line in the mental and cultural life of the nation. The classic account is Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1977). See also, Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The Great War and English Culture (1991). For an alternative view of war’s impact on national identity: J. Winter, ‘British National Identity and the First World War’, in S. Green & C. Whiting (eds.), The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain; Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War (2008); Jay Winter, ‘Popular Culture in Wartime Britain’, in A. Roshwald & R. Stites (eds.), European Culture in the Great War (1999); Rosa Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War (1993); Alisa Miller, ‘Rupert Brooke and the Growth of Commercial Patriotism in Great Britain, 1914-18’, Twentieth Century British History, 21 (2010), 141-62; Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front (2002) - ebook; Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995).
- On the war, gender and post-war national identity: Alison Light, Forever England; and for more ideas on the War’s legacy for the relationship between sex and gender: S. Kingsley Kent, 'The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism', Journal of British Studies, 27 (1988), pp. 232-53; S. Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (1994); Judy Giles, Women, Identity, and Private Life, 1900-1950 (1985); Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (2004); Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Re-Negotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (2002); P. Ward, ‘“Women of Britain say Go”: Women’s Patriotism in the First World War’, 20th Century British History, 12 (2001), 23-45; Ilana R. Bet-El, 'Men and Soldiers: British Conscripts, Concepts of Masculinity and the Great War', in Billie Melman (ed.), Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930 (1998), pp. 73-94; Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (1996); Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinity (1994); J. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War (2004); S. Gilbert, 'Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women and the Great War', in M. Higonnet et al (eds.), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (1987), pp. 197-226; S. Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (1994); Lucy Noakes, War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity (1998); S. Pedersen, ‘Gender, Welfare and Citizenship in Britain during the Great War’, American Historical Review, 95 (1990), 983-1006; Michael Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity: The “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914-1950’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), 343-62; J. Winter, ‘Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35 (2000).
- The War also left its mark on the nation through the practices of memorialisation that emerged in the next decades: Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919-1946 (1994); A. King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (1998); Moriarty, ‘The Material Culture of Great War Remembrance’, Journal of Contemporary History, 34 (1999); Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (2005); J. Winter, ‘Britain’s ‘Lost Generation’ of the First World War’, Population Studies, 31 (1977), 449-66; A. King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (1998); J. Bartlett & K.M. Ellis, 'Remembering the Dead in Northrop: First World War Memorials in a Welsh Parish', Journal of Contemporary History, 34 (1999); Catherine Moriarty, 'Private Grief and Public Remembrance: British First World War Memorials' in M. Evans & K. Lunn (eds.), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (1997), pp. 125-42; K. Inglis, ‘The Homecoming: The War Memorial Movement in Cambridge, England’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27 (1992), pp. 583-605; J. Bartlett & K.M. Ellis, ‘Remembering the Dead in Northrop: First World War Memorials in a Welsh Parish’, Journal of Contemporary History, 34 (1999), pp. 231-42.
- On the persistence of the Great War in national memory: Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme; Dan Todman, The Great War, Myth and Memory (2005); Jay Winter (ed.), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (1999); Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities (2001).