Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts

Ann-Marie Einhaus is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature in the Department of Humanities at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her main research specialism is short fiction of and about the First World War from 1914 to the present, and she has also published on links between teaching, literature and cultural memory of the war, on middlebrow fiction, and on Wyndham Lewis. Katherine Isobel Baxter is Reader in English Literature at Northumbria University. She is the author of 'Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance' (2010) and the co-editor of 'The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts' (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 'Conrad and Language' (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and 'Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts' (2009). She is general editor of the journal 'English'.

• Introduction (Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter)SECTION I: LITERATURE1: The Uncertain War a Century on: The First World War in British and Irish Fiction (Marie Stern-Peltz)2: Poetry of the First World War in Britain (Clara Dawson)3: First World War Short Fiction (Ann-Marie Einhaus)4: Theatre: 1914 and After (Andrew Maunder)5: Words from Home: Wartime Correspondences (Alice Kelly)6: Transnational Lives: Colonial Life Writing and the First World War (Anna Maguire)SECTION II: VISUAL ARTS7: The ‘Abysmal inexcusable middle class’, Painting, Commemoration, and the First World War (Matthew Potter)8: ‘Varied to Infinity’: The First World War and Sculpture (Laura Brandon)9: Memorials: Embodiment and Unconventional Mourning (Laura Wittman)10: Posters, Advertising and the First World War in Britain (James Thompson)SECTION III: MUSIC11: ‘We think you ought to go’: Music Hall and Recruitment in the First World War (Robert Dean)12: British Soldiers’ Songs (George Simmers)13: The First World War in Popular Music since 1958 (Peter Grant)14: Requiems and Memorial Music (Kate Kennedy)SECTION IV: PERIODICALS AND JOURNALISM15: Popular Periodicals: Wartime Newspapers, Magazines and Journals (Kate Macdonald)16: Evolving Wartime Print Cultures of the Anglo-American Modern Literary Renaissance (Christopher J. La Casse)17: Pamphlets and Political Writing (Matthew Shaw)18: ‘The whole of war is an atrocity’: Morgan Philips Price and First World War Reporting in the Ottoman/Russian Borderlands (Jo Laycock)SECTION V: FILM AND BROADCASTING19: Official War Films in Britain: The Battle of the Somme (1916), its impact then and its meaning today (Toby Haggith)20: Too Colossal to be Dramatic: The Cinema of the Great War (Michael Paris)21: Representations of the First World War in Contemporary British Television Drama (Emma Hanna)22: The Sound of War: Audio, Radio and the First World War (Richard J. Hand)SECTION VI: Publishing and Material Culture23: The British Publishing Industry and the First World War (Jane Potter)24: Photography and the First World War (J. J. Long)25: The Imperial War Museum and the material culture of the First World War, 1917–2014 (Alys Cundy) 26: The Evolution of First World War Computer Games (Chris Kempshall)

This omnibus volume edited by Einhaus and Baxter is richly illustrated and packed with a remarkable array of studies devoted to the cultural ecosystem in Britain during the war. It reaches out geographically to include reportage on the Ottoman front, Anglophone writing in Ireland or America and the colonies, as well as cultural legacies, such as sculptural memorials, in some other European countries. Every conceivable genre from poetry to propaganda poster is represented. At the same time, individual chapters unsettle conventional distinctions among forms and offer economic and statistical as well as textual analyses. Contributors explore diverse audiences with a social reach from high to low, or mainstream to avant-garde and general to local. Useful historical analyses of political conditions that constrained or promoted production inform our understanding of both canonized and popular texts. A welcome representation of media, and vivid descriptions of performances, including conflicts within their audiences, bring the moment to life. One comes away astonished by the vast range of culture enjoyed on the home front, in music halls, cinema, in large audiences as well as in the comfort of one’s armchair. 　　While full attention is given to material from 1914-1918, a distinctive accomplishment of this collection is the sustained pursuit of the afterlife of the war in novels, films, memorials, children’s literature, television and even computer games. The conflicts of the past, we learn, continue to challenge and divide audiences even today.