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This book explores emotional responses to total war with a focus on the modern European experience. Examining particular wartime locations, and mapping national and transnational emotional cultures, the book suggests new ways of deploying emotion historically as an analytical device.
List of contents
- Foreword
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1: CLAIRE LANGHAMER, LUCY NOAKES AND CLAUDIA SIEBRECHT: Introduction
- 2: UTE FREVERT: Emotions in Times of War: Private and Public, Individual and Collective
- 3: SUSAN R. GRAYZEL: 'Macabre and Hilarious': The Emotional Life of the Civilian Gas Mask in France during and after the First World War
- 4: MICHAEL ROPER: Little Ruby's Hand: Young Women and the Emotional Experience of Caregiving in Britain after the First World War
- 5: CLAUDIA SIEBRECHT: The Tears of 1939: German Women and the Emotional Archive of the First World War
- 6: MARTIN FRANCIS: Wounded Pride and Petty Jealousies: Private Lives and Public Diplomacy in Second World War Cairo
- 7: LUCY NOAKES: Communities of Feeling: Fear, Death and Grief in the Writing of British Servicemen in the Second World War
- 8: CLAIRE LANGHAMER: 'Astray in a dark forest'? The Emotional Politics of Reconstruction Britain
- 9: JOY DAMOUSI: In Search of Victor: Transnationalism, Emotion and War
- Index
About the author
Claire Langhamer is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Sussex. She works on feelings, ordinariness and everyday life and makes particular use of the Mass Observation Archive, of which she is a Trustee. Her publications include articles on home, happiness, adultery, children's writing and women's work and the books Women's Leisure in England, 1920-1960 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000) and The English in Love: the intimate story of an emotional revolution (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013). She is currently writing a history of Feelings at Work in Modern Britain.
Lucy Noakes is a social and cultural historian working at the University of Essex, where she holds the Rab Butler Chair in Modern History. Her work focuses on the two total wars of the twentieth century, and explores issues of gender, memory, selfhood and memory. Publications include War and the British (1998), War and the Gentle Sex (2006), and British Cultural Memory and the Second World War, edited with Juliette Pattinson. She is currently writing a history of death, grief and bereavement in Second World War Britain for Manchester University Press.
Dr Claudia Siebrecht is Senior Lecturer in modern history at the University of Sussex and her research interests include the cultural history of war, the history of emotions and visual history. She holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin and has taught at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women's Art of the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2013), has recently co-edited Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, 1870-1950: Raising the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and her current book project is a cultural history of concentration camps.
Summary
Love, grief, hate and fear are among the emotions most immediately associated with the rhetoric, experience and memory of war. Focusing on Europe during and after the two world wars, this volume explores the emotional worlds of those who lived their lives under war's shadow.
