Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History

by Jay Winter

• ISBN13: 9780521639880
• ISBN10: 0521639883
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-03-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 191418, 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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vi	(2)
Acknowledgements	viii	(2)
List of abbreviations	x
Introduction	1	(12)
I. Catastrophe and consolation	13	(104)
1 Homecomings: the return of the dead	15	(14)
2 Communities in mourning	29	(25)
3 Spiritualism and the `Lost Generation'	54	(24)
4 War memorials and the mourning process	78	(39)
II. Cultural codes and languages of mourning	117	(113)
5 Mythologies of war: films, popular religion, and the business of the sacred	119	(26)
6 The apocalyptic imagination in art: from anticipation to allegory	145	(33)
7 The apocalyptic imagination in war literature	178	(26)
8 War poetry, romanticism, and the return of the sacred	204	(19)
9 Conclusion	223	(7)
Notes	230	(43)
Bibliography	273	(25)
Index	298