A revisionist study that rejects the time-honored argument that the
Great War was the cataclysmic break with the epoch that preceded it
Download Plain Text version Although many novels and works of
history have been published on the calamity that was the First
World War, no work until this one has sought to unify current
historical and literary interpretations of the 1914-1918 era and
its implications for modern life. The essays collected here chart
the war and its cultural and literary contours from a variety of
new and challenging intellectual vantage points. Focusing in
different essays on America, France, Britain, and Germany, the
contributors to this book contest the long-accepted argument about
World War I as the crucible of modern life. Instead, their
interrogations of the trench experience, home-front conditions,
forms of mass culture, and literary genres reveal that the war was
as much a moment of cultural opportunity as it was the point of
origin for modern society or its cultural forms. Showing how
prudery and decency became patriotic imperatives after 1914, for
example, they explore how the wartime experience allowed for a
cultural ""crackdown"" on decadence and sexuality that had been a
conservative cry long before the war but became a matter of state
policy only with the start of hostilities. In similarly revisionist
interpretations of politics, literature, morality, and post-war
efforts to memorialize the wartime experience, the contributors
collapse the long-held notion of the war as a cataclysmic break
with the epoch that preceded it. What they show instead is that the
mass culture of the pre-war era produced and defined the war, just
as the warring states used the forces of mass culture to keep the
fighting going, to sustain society behind the lines, and ultimately
to construct meaning and historical memory out of a thing we still
call the ""Great War."" Douglas Mackaman, the author of Leisure
Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine and the Spa in Modern France,
is an associate professor of history and the director of French
area studies at the University of Southern Mississippi. Michael
Mays is an associate professor of English and the co-founder and
co-director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Life at the
University of Southern Mississippi.
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