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Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning

The Great War in European Cultural History
Jay Winter , Pembroke College, Cambridge
May 2014
Available
Paperback
9781107661653

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    Jay Winter's powerful study of the 'collective remembrance' of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Dr Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. Taking issue with the prevailing 'modernist' interpretation of the European reaction to the appalling events of 1914–18, Dr Winter instead argues that what characterised that reaction was, rather, the attempt to interpret the Great War within traditional frames of reference. Tensions arose inevitably. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a profound and moving book of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century.

    • An accessible and poignant study of the Great War and its social and personal toll
    • Employs a wide variety of literary, artistic and architectural evidence to look at the culture of commemoration
    • A profound and moving book of seminal importance

    Reviews & endorsements

    'No one interested in the broad impact of the First World War, or the cultural history of the twentieth century, can afford to neglect this book.' The Times Literary Supplement

    'One seldom puts down a work of history with such a feeling of having penetrated to the bedrock of emotions that inspired a time that now seems very far away, very different, and very past.' The Journal of Modern History

    See more reviews

    Product details

    May 2014
    Paperback
    9781107661653
    320 pages
    215 × 137 × 16 mm
    0.45kg
    31 b/w illus.
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • Part I. Catastrophe and Consolation:
    • 1. Homecomings: the return of the dead
    • 2. Communities in mourning
    • 3. Spiritualism and the 'Lost Generation'
    • 4. War memorials and the mourning process
    • Part II. Cultural Codes and Languages of Mourning:
    • 5. Mythologies of war: films, popular religion, and the business of the sacred
    • 6. The apocalyptic imagination in art: from anticipation to allegory
    • 7. The apocalyptic imagination in war literature
    • 8. War poetry, romanticism, and the return of the sacred
    • 9. Conclusion
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index.
      Author
    • Jay Winter , Pembroke College, Cambridge