Angela K. Smith

Sandra Barkhof

Human displacement has always been a consequence of war, written into the myths and histories of centuries of warfare. However, the global conflicts of the twentieth century brought displacement to civilizations on an unprecedented scale, as the two World Wars shifted participants around the globe. Although driven by political disputes between European powers, the consequences of Empire ensured that Europe could not contain them. Soldiers traversed continents, and civilians often followed them, or found themselves living in territories ruled by unexpected invaders. Both wars saw fighting in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, and few nations remained neutral. Both wars saw the mass upheaval of civilian populations as a consequence of the fighting. Displacements were geographical, cultural, and psychological; they were based on nationality, sex/gender or age. They produced an astonishing range of human experience, recorded by the participants in different ways. This book brings together a collection of inter-disciplinary works by scholars who are currently producing some of the most innovative and influential work on the subject of displacement in war, in order to share their knowledge and interpretations of historical and literary sources. The collection unites historians and literary scholars in addressing the issues of war and displacement from multiple angles. Contributors draw on a wealth of primary source materials and resources including archives from across the world, military records, medical records, films, memoirs, diaries and letters, both published and private, and fictional interpretations of experience.

Global Conflicts

War and Displacement in the Twentieth Century

This edited collection explores and develops representations of war experience from 1914 to the ongoing conflicts of the 21st century, through the specific lens of memory. It builds on recent explorations of the importance of war experience in shaping cultural memory that have focused on the aftermath of the First World War and the Second World War, particularly through Holocaust studies. These essays, by a range of international and interdisciplinary scholars, broaden the scope considerably, examining the alternate spaces of the First World War and those that followed it through a range of different media, offering an artistic trajectory to the centennial commemorations of 2014-18.

War Experience and Memory in Global Cultures Since 1914

Gender and warfare in the twentieth century is a collection of exciting, accessible and very readable essays that span the twentieth century, exploring the ways in which men and women have both represented warfare, and represented themselves as participants in warfare. A range of contributors from different disciplines explore these representations by examining a wide variety of sources: fiction, film, personal diaries, memoirs, non-fiction, letters, oral testimonies and more. The collection ranges from the trenches of the Western Front, through the shell-shocked inter-war years, the civil war in Spain and the disparate battle fronts of World War Two, to the complexities of Vietnam and the late century Hollywood workings and re-workings of these conflicts. The focus on gendered readings provides a thread that binds these essays together to create a comprehensive and interesting picture of the legacy of twentieth-century warfare at the beginning of the new millennium.

Textual representations

Gender and warfare in the twentieth century

This book investigates the connection between women's writing about WWI and the development of literary modernisms, focusing on issues of gender which remain topical today. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished diaries and letters, the book examines the way in which the new roles undertaken by women triggered a search for new forms of expression. Blending literary criticism and history, the book contributes to the scholarship of women and expands our definition of modernisms.

Women, Modernism and the First World War

The Second Battlefield

Women from across the social spectrum had their lives transformed by World War I. The literary culture of the early 20th century led a surprising number of women to write about their experiences, recording everything from their emotional responses and political impulses to their new experiences of the world of work. Writing by women as diverse as Sylvia Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf and Vesta Tilley are blended with extracts from the private diaries and letters of unknown women, to provide a sometimes tragic, sometimes comic testimony. From patriotic rhetoric to the gritty realism of the Front Line, this anthology juxtaposes fact and fiction and aims to present a rounded picture of World War I as it was lived and fought by women across Britain.

An Anthology

Women's Writing of the First World War

In the first in-depth study of the relationship between the suffrage campaign in Britain and World War I, Angela K. Smith explores the links between these two defining moments of the early twentieth century. Did the opportunities afforded by the war enable women finally and irrefutably to demonstrate their right to full citizenship? Or did World War I actually postpone women's enfranchisement? Although the Suffrage Movement was divided by the outbreak of war, many women continued to campaign for the vote, producing a wide variety of fictional and nonfictional 'suffrage texts'. Whether the writing of these women demonstrated their patriotism, pacifism, or ambivalence, it formed an integral part of their political responses to the war. Through textual/literary analysis of Suffrage magazines, wartime diaries, and a range of topical novels, Smith explores these responses within historical, social, and cultural contexts to understand the impact of the war on the success of the campaign in 1918 and the consequences for the years that followed.

Suffrage Discourse in Britain during the First World War

Krista Cowman

This volume aims to provide a wider view of First World War experience through focusing on landscapes less commonly considered in historiography, and on voices that have remained on the margins of popular understanding of the war. The landscape of the western front was captured during the conflict in many different ways: in photographs, paintings and print. The most commonly replicated voicing of contemporary attitudes towards the war is that of initial enthusiasm giving way to disillusionment and a sense of overwhelming futility. Investigations of the many components of war experience drawn from social and cultural history have looked to landscapes and voices beyond the frontline as a means of foregrounding different perspectives on the war. Not all of the voices presented here opposed the war, and not all of the landscapes were comprised of trenches or flanked by barbed wire. Collectively, they combine to offer further fresh insights into the multiplicity of war experience, an alternate space to the familiar tropes of mud and mayhem.

Landscapes and Voices of the Great War

This collection brings together essays that explore and develop representations of war experience from 1914 to the present, through the lens of memory. Historians, art historians and literary scholars explore a range of different textual spaces, asking how our understanding of the past might impact on our interpretations of the present.

Angela K. Smith

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