Covid-19, the Second World War, and the Idea of Britishness

Joanne Pettitt is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. She is the secretary of the British Association of Holocaust Studies and a member of the executive board of the European Association of Holocaust Studies. She is also co-editor-in-chief of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. Joanne’s work focuses on representations of Holocaust perpetrators in literature and her first monograph – Perpetrators in Narratives of the Holocaust: Encountering the Nazi Beast – was published in June 2017. She is currently working on a comparative study on the uses of Nazism in representations of the British far right.

• Contents: Joanne Pettitt: Covid-19, the Second World War, and the Idea of Britishness – Charlie Hall: Global Threats to an Island Story: Covid-19 and the British «Foundation Myth» of 1940 – Sophy Antrobus: «A Nation at War»: Battle of Britain Narratives Revived and Repurposed by Covid-19 – Julian Petley: Don’t Mention the War – Leighton Andrews: «Like Any Wartime Government»: Covid-19, Churchillian Imaginaries and the Limits of English Exceptionalism – Peter Donaldson: Taking It on the Chin: Sport, War and Covid-19 – Eluned Gramich: England Is Not a Template: Wales, Britishness and Covid-19 – Tony Kushner: Wrong War Mate (Reprise): Britain, the Holocaust and Covid-19. A Polemic – Linda Maynard: «A Beacon of Light»: Representations of Captain Tom Moore and the «Silent Generation» of Covid-19 Victims – Kara Critchell: Disrupting the Rituals of Grief: Conflict, Covid-19 and the Fracturing of Funerary Tradition – Cat Mahoney: «We Will Meet Again»: Mobilising Prosthetic Memories of the Second World War during the UK Covid-19 Lockdown – Lauren Cantillon: «Keep Calm and Bake Bananas»: Reimagining Wartime Posters for Covid-19 – Robert Eaglestone: Cruel Nostalgia and Covid-19 – Michael Samuel: Finest Hour 2.0: Digital Nostalgic Popular Culture and Covid-19 – Postscript.

«This challenging and controversial volume should give all of us pause for thought. Some contemporary political voices seem to want us to believe that the past is fixed and stable, but the essays presented here remind us that the past is as radically unstable as our future.»(Professor Tom Lawson, Northumbria University)«In its lively examination of the myriad ways in which the Second World War has been frequently referenced in the current pandemic, Covid-19, the Second World War, and the Idea of Britishness makes a fascinating and important contribution to the scholarship on the war’s cultural memory. A truly enlightening collection and a must read.»(Professor Juliette Pattinson, University of Kent)