The Labour of Loss
The Labour of Loss
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The Labour of Loss, first published in 1999, explores how mothers, fathers, widows, relatives and friends dealt with their experiences of grief and loss during and after the First and Second World Wars. Based on an examination of private loss through letters and diaries, it makes a significant contribution to understanding how people came to terms with the deaths of friends and family. The book considers the ways in which the bereaved dealt with grief psychologically, and analyses the social and cultural context within which they mourned their dead. Damousi shows that grief remained with people as they attempted to re-build an internal and external world without those to whom they had been so fundamentally attached. Unlike other studies in this area, The Labour of Loss considers how mourning affected men and women in different ways, and analyses the gendered dimensions of grief.
- uses imaginative and provocatine primary source material
- powefully written
- original arguments about war and grief
Reviews & endorsements
' … compelling … The Labour of Loss offers a new perspective on the impact of twentieth-century warfare, because it engages seriously with the dimensions of grief and emotion experienced by soldiers and their families.' Kate Darian-Smith, The Times Literary Supplement
'This sensitive, though sometimes harrowing, study of the impact of war and the ensuring peace … will surely have wide cross-disciplinary resonance.' The Times Higher Education Supplement
' … deserves the highest praise. Without ever sacrificing a formidable theoretical power, [Damousi] never forgets that this is an intensely human story. It is one of the best, perhaps the best, book of its kind.' English Historical Review
'… scholarly and humane …'. Grief Matters
Product details
April 2011Adobe eBook Reader
9780511891557
0 pages
0kg
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Part I. The First World War:
- 1. Theatres of grief, theatres of loss
- 2. The sacrificial mother
- 3. A father's loss
- 4. The war widow and the cost of memory
- 5. Returned limbless soldiers: identity through loss
- Part II. The Second World War:
- 6. Absence as loss on the homefront and the battlefront
- 7. Grieving mothers
- 8. A war widow's mourning.
