The contributors to this volume approach the World Wars as complex and intertwined crossroads leading to the definition of a new European reality. While assessing the the way the memories of the two World Wars have been readjusted each time in relation to the evolving international historical setting and through various mediators of memory (cinema, literature, art and monuments), the various essays contribute to unveil a cultural panorama inhabited by contrasting memories.

This book seeks to place children and young people centrally within the study of the contemporary British home front, its cultural representations and its place in the historical memory of the First World War. This edited collection interrogates not only war and its effects on children and young people, but how understandings of this conflict have shaped or been shaped by historical memories of the Great War, which have only allowed for several tropes of childhood during the conflict to emerge. It brings together new research by emerging and established scholars who, through a series of tightly focussed case studies, introduce a range of new histories to both explore the experience of being young during the First World War, and interrogate the memories and representations of the conflict produced for children. Taken together the chapters in this volume shed light on the multiple ways in which the Great War shaped, disrupted and interrupted childhood in Britain, and illuminate simultaneously the selectivity of the portrayal of the conflict within the more typical national narratives.

With several terms from the First World War still present in modern speech, Languages and the First World War presents over 30 essays by international academics investigating the linguistic aspects of the 1914-18 conflict. The first of the two volumes covers language change and documentation during the period of the war, while the second examines the representation and the memory of the war. Communicating in a Transnational War examines languages at the front, including the subject of interpretation, translation and parallels between languages; communication with the home front; propaganda and language manipulation; and recording language during the war. Representation and Memory examines historiographical issues; the nature of representing the war in letters and diaries; the documentation of language change; the language of representing the war in reportage and literature; and the language of remembering the war. Covered in the process are slang, censorship, soldiers' phrasebooks, code-switching, borrowing terms, the problems facing multilingual armies, and gendered language.

Why do certain places and not others symbolically capture the past and freeze time? Likewise, why does the process of memory, as a fluid and changing activity, seem to prevent its own solidification? Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe reflects not only on the persistence of the past as a theme linked to modernity, media and time, but also discusses the politics of memory within a changing Europe. Drawing on the theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin and Zygmunt Bauman, Siobhan Kattago uses examples from both Germany and Estonia in order to address the multiple layers of Europe's totalitarian past. Through reflecting on the legacy of totalitarianism and the revolutions of 1989, it becomes clear that the issue is less of whether one should remember, but rather how to internalize the various lessons of the past for the future of Europe. Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe thus offers the reader occasions upon which to take stock of different but overlapping contours of past and present in contemporary Europe.

The twenty-seven original contributions to this volume investigate the ways in which the First World War has been commemorated and represented internationally in prose fiction, drama, film, docudrama and comics from the 1960s until the present. The volume thus provides a comprehensive survey of the cultural memory of the war as reflected in various media across national cultures, addressing the complex connections between the cultural post-memory of the war and its mediation. In four sections, the essays investigate (1) the cultural legacy of the Great War (including its mythology and iconography); (2) the implications of different forms and media for representing the war; (3) ‘national’ memories, foregrounding the differences in post-memory representations and interpretations of the Great War, and (4) representations of the Great War within larger temporal or spatial frameworks, focusing specifically on the ideological dimensions of its ‘remembrance’ in historical, socio-political, gender-oriented, and post-colonial contexts.

Few historical events have resonated as much in modern British culture as the Second World War. It has left a rich legacy in a range of media that continue to attract a wide audience: film, TV and radio, photography and the visual arts, journalism and propaganda, architecture, museums, music and literature. The enduring presence of the war in the public world is echoed in its ongoing centrality in many personal and family memories, with stories of the Second World War being recounted through the generations. This collection brings together recent historical work on the cultural memory of the war, examining its presence in family stories, in popular and material culture and in acts of commemoration in Britain between 1945 and the present.

Memory, while seemingly a thing of the past, has much to reveal in the present. With its focus on memory, War and Remembrance provides new viewpoints in the field of war representation. Bringing an interdisciplinary approach to discussions of the cultural memory of war, the collection focuses on narratives, either fictional or testimonial, that challenge ideological discourses of war. The acts of remembrance and of waging war are constantly evolving. A range of case studies – analyzing representations of war in art, film, museums, and literature from Nigeria, Australia, Sri Lanka, Canada, and beyond – questions our current approaches to memory studies while offering reinterpretations of established narratives. Throughout, a commitment to Indigenous perspectives, to examining the ongoing legacy of colonialism, and to a continued reckoning with the Second World War foregrounds what is often forgotten in the writing of a single, official history. War and Remembrance invites readers to cast a reflexive look at wars and conflicts past – some of them forgotten, others still vividly commemorated – the better to understand the cultural, political, and social stake of memory as a source of conflict and exchange, of resistance and opposition, and of negotiation and reconciliation.

Remembering the First World War brings together a group of international scholars to understand how and why the past quarter of a century has witnessed such an extraordinary increase in global popular and academic interest in the First World War, both as an event and in the ways it is remembered. The book discusses this phenomenon across three key areas. The first section looks at family history, genealogy and the First World War, seeking to understand the power of family history in shaping and reshaping remembrance of the War at the smallest levels, as well as popular media and the continuing role of the state and its agencies. The second part discusses practices of remembering and the more public forms of representation and negotiation through film, literature, museums, monuments and heritage sites, focusing on agency in representing and remembering war. The third section covers the return of the War and the increasing determination among individuals to acknowledge and participate in public rituals of remembrance with their own contemporary politics. What, for instance, does it mean to wear a poppy on armistice/remembrance day? How do symbols like this operate today? These chapters will investigate these aspects through a series of case studies. Placing remembrance of the First World War in its longer historical and broader transnational context and including illustrations and an afterword by Professor David Reynolds, this is the ideal book for all those interested in the history of the Great War and its aftermath.

Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe discusses processes of memory construction associated with the realities of war and genocide, totalitarianism, colonialism as well as trans-border dialogues in the overcoming of conflict memories. It is based on the premise that there are no available clear-cut or definite positions to approach the problematic issues of conflict, memory and history. Consequently, it examines and articulates across several different media discourses, problems, contexts and considerations of value. Its scope is thus deliberately interdisciplinary, drawing on the cross-fertilization of diverse research methods. The book addresses a number of issues and raises questions that have been crucial to our modern thought, and problematic or even inexplicable to any cultural theory that approaches history with an ethical approach. It works through and evaluates ongoing representative processes, strategies and practices, next to longstanding constraints, dilemmas and taboos regarding discussions of contentious matters. The different perspectives from which the issues of conflict, identity and memory are examined, in authoritarian, new European and (post-) colonial contexts, provide examples of power and conflict memory intervening in discourse and areas of cultural practice, destabilizing fixed or encoded meaning. It examines how the “making sense” of our memories—so vital for the qualification of culture and social practices—is about concepts and ideas, as well as emotions and attachments, i.e. meaning resulting from effective social exchange framed by specific contexts of interpretation. As such, the book is also a contribution to a memory culture that is pushing forward the clarification of conflicts, crystallizations of tension and all sorts of threads that bind us, very often invisibly, to the past.