Culture in Camouflage aims to remap the history of British war
culture by insisting on the centrality and importance of the
literature of the Second World War. The book offers the first
comprehensive account of the emergence of modern war culture,
arguing that its exceptional forms and temporalities force us to
reappraise British cultural modernity.
The book explores how writers like Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried
Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth
Bowen, Virginia Woolf, James Hanley, Rex Warner, Alexander Baron,
Keith Douglas, Henry Green, and Graham Greene contested the
dominant narratives of war projected by an enormously powerful and
persuasive mass media and culture industry. Patrick Deer reads war
literature as one element in an expanded cultural field, which also
includes popular culture and mass communications, the productions
of war planners and military historians, projections of new
technologies of violence, the fantasies and theories of
strategists, and the material culture of total war.
Modern war cultures, Deer contends, are defined by their drive to
normalize conflict and war-making, by their struggle to colonize
the entire wartime cultural field, and by their claim to monopolize
representations and interpretation of the conflict. But the
mobilization of cultural formations during wartime reveals, at
times glaringly, the constitutive contradictions at the heart of
modern ideas of culture. The Great War failed to produce a popular
war culture on the home front, producing instead an extraordinary
literature of protest, yet the strategists struggled to regain
their oversight over both the enemy across no man's land, and the
minds and bodies of their own mass conscript armies. The interwar
years saw a massive effort to make strategic fantasies a reality;
if the technology of imperial air power or mobile armoured warfare
did not yet exist, culture could be mobilized to shore up the
ramshackle war machine. During World War Two a fully fledged
British war culture emerged triumphant in time of national crisis,
offering the vision of a fully mobilized island fortress, a loyal
empire, and a modernized war machine ready to wage a futuristic war
of space and movement. This was the struggle that British World War
Two writers confronted with extraordinary courage and creativity.
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