Re Imagining The First World War

In the Preface to his ground-breaking The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell claimed that “the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical, and artistic determinants on subsequent life.” Forty years after the publication of Fussell’s study, the contributors to this volume reconsider whether the myth generated by World War I is still “part of the fiber of [people’s] lives” in English-speaking countries. What is the place of the First World War in cultural memory today? How have the literary means for remembering the war changed since the war? Can anything new be learned from the effort to re-imagine the First World War after other bloody conflicts of the 20th century? A variety of answers to these questions are provided in Re-Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture, which explores the Great War in British, Irish, Canadian, Australian, and (post)colonial contexts. The contributors to this collection write about the war from a literary perspective, reinterpreting poetry, fiction, letters, and essays created during or shortly after the war, exploring contemporary discourses of commemoration, and presenting in-depth studies of complex conceptual issues, such as gender and citizenship. Re-Imagining the First World War also includes historical, philosophical and sociological investigations of the first industrialised conflict of the 20th century, which focus on responses to the Great War in political discourse, life writing, music, and film: from the experience of missionaries isolated during the war in the Arctic and Asia, through colonial encounters, exploring the role of Irish, Chinese and Canadian First Nations soldiers during the war, to the representation of war in the world-famous series Downton Abbey and the 2013 album released by contemporary Scottish rock singer Fish. The variety of themes covered by the essays here not only confirms the significance of the First World War in memory today, but also illustrates the necessity of developing new approaches to the first global conflict, and of commemorating “new” victims and agents of war. If modes of remembrance have changed with the postmodern ethical shift in historiography and cultural studies, which encourages the exploration of “other” subjectivities in war, so-far concealed affinities and reverberations are still being discovered, on the macro- and micro-historical levels, the Western and other fronts, the battlefield, and the home front. Although it has been a hundred years since the outbreak of hostilities, there is a need for increased sensitivity to the tension between commemoration and contestation, and to re-member, re-conceptualise and re-imagine the Great War.

The 2014 centenary of the outbreak of World War One has resulted in a noticeable increase in the number of publications devoted to this conflict. A question thus arises what makes Conflicting discourses, competing memories: Commemorating The First World War stand out among similar volumes. Indeed, it is the cinematic scope that distinguishes it, as the collected articles comprise a wide spectrum of research, including prose, poetry and film as well as painting dedicated to the Great War. Simultaneously, the book propose an interesting trans-historical purview, combining discussions of the cultural representation of the Great War both from the interwar period and from the contemporary post-memory perspective. The volume as a whole emphasises the significance of the Great War within the context of international cultural memory, as it includes Polish, Romanian, Italian, British, Canadian and American perspectives. From the review by Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, PhD, DLitt

(Re)Imagining the world: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times considers how writers of fiction for children imagine ‘the world’, not one universal world, but different worlds: imaginary, strange, familiar, even monstrous worlds. The chapters in this collection discuss how fiction for children engages with some of the changes brought about by new technologies, information literacy, consumerism, migration, politics, different family structures, cosmopolitanism, new and old monsters. They also invite us to think about how memory shapes our understanding of the past, and how fiction engages our emotions, our capacity to empathise, and our desire to discover, and what the future may hold. The contributors bring different perspectives from education, postcolonial studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, childhood studies, postmodernism, and the social sciences. With a wide coverage of texts from different countries, and scholarly and lively discussions, this collection is itself a testament to the power of the human imagination and the significance of children’s literature in the education of young people. ​

While sectarian violence has greatly diminished on the streets of Belfast and Derry, proxy battles over the right to define Northern Ireland’s identity through its new symbolic landscapes continue. Offering a detailed ethnographic account of Northern Ireland’s post-conflict visual transformation, this book examines the official effort to produce new civic images against a backdrop of ongoing political and social struggle. Interviews with politicians, policymakers, community leaders, cultural workers, and residents shed light on the deeply contested nature of seemingly harmonized urban landscapes in societies undergoing radical structural change. Here, the public art process serves as a vital means to understanding the wider politics of a transforming public sphere in an age of globalization and transnational connectivity.

The twenty-first century exploded into the global imagination with unforgettable scenes of death and destruction. An apocalyptic 'clash of civilizations' seemed to be waged between two old foes - 'the West' and 'Islam.' However, the decade-long and ruinous 'war on terror' has prompted re-assessments of the militaristic approach to Western-Muslim relations. A growing number of academics, policymakers, religious leaders, journalists, and activists view the struggles as resulting from a 'clash of ignorance.' Re-imagining the Other examines the ways in which knowledge is manipulated by dominant Western and Muslim discourses. Authors from several disciplines study how the two societies have constructed images of each other in historical and contemporary times. The complexities and subtleties of their mutually productive relationship are overshadowed by portrayals of unremitting clash, thus serving as encouragement for the promotion of war and terrorism. The book proposes specific approaches to re-imagine the Other in order to mitigate Western-Muslim conflict.

'Soft security' - what does it mean? Cultural interaction is a key to secure coexistence - building of transnational institutions and processes and learning how to speak to each other across chasms of incomprehension. The effect of security is readable in the state of intercultural communication and dialogue. Learning to read it is vital to us all.

This study of historical, sociological, philosophical and literary sources, shows how, by both consolidating and contesting national myths, fiction continues to construct the 1914-1918 conflict as a cultural trauma, illuminating at the same time some of our most recent ethical concerns.

Metal is a form of popular music. Popular music is a form of leisure. In the modern age, popular music has become part of popular culture, a heavily contested collection of practices and industries that construct place, belonging and power.