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Cities into Battlefields - Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,497
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Cities into Battlefields - Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War (Paperback)
Series: Historical Urban Studies Series
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Cities have always had a key role in warfare, as strategic centres
which periodically suffered the horrors of siege and sack. With
industrialisation, however, they were drawn ever closer to the
front line and to direct and continuous experience of fighting and
destruction. 'Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios,
Experiences and Commemorations of Total War' explores the cultural
imprint of military conflict on metropolises world wide in the era
of the First and Second World Wars. It brings together cultural and
urban historians and scholars of related disciplines including
anthropology, education, and geography. The volume examines how the
emergence of 'total' warfare blurred the boundaries between home
and front and transformed cities into battlefields. The logic of
total mobilisation turned the social and cultural fabric of urban
life upside down. Arranged so as to bring out the evolution of
experience over time, the essays explore Eastern and Central
Europe, Britain and Western Europe, and Japan and address several
key themes. The first strand - scenarios - explores the apocalyptic
imagination of intellectuals and experts in peacetime. Artists and
writers anticipating doom presented the coming upheaval as an urban
event - a commonplace of late-Victorian and post-1918 pessimism. On
a different plane, civil servants and engineers materialised
visions of urban chaos and devised countermeasures in case of
emergencies. Both groups helped to furnish a repertoire of cultural
forms which channelled and encoded the actual experience of war.
The second strand deals with metropolitan experiences, notably
mobilisation, deprivation, and destruction in wartime. Ruins and
the repercussions of war is the central theme of the third strand -
commemorations - which investigates post-war efforts to remember
and forget. The quest for meaningful forms of commemoration was
hard enough after the First World War; the Second World War, which
saw whole cities disappear in flames, raised the possibility that
the limits of representation had been reached. The central
contention of this volume - that total war in the twentieth century
has a significant but often overlooked metropolitan dimension - is
fully addressed, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in the currently
available literature.
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