Images of war and its commemoration are an everyday presence in contemporary culture, from the embedded reporter in the field to the Last Post at the Menin Gate. Disasters and Heroes: On War, Memory and Representation revisits campaigns from the plains of Troy to recent events in the Balkans, examining how wars are represented and remembered. Angus Calder shows how the ’facts’of war are transformed into myths that condition later responses to war, and how the construction of memory begins with wartime events themselves.
Beginning with a section devoted to war memorials and the public remembrance of war, such as D-Day commemorations, the essays collected in Disasters and Heroes then look at the lived experience of war for ’ordinary’ people, while the final section deals with literary representation of war, from The Iliad to T.E. Lawrence and on to Christa Wolf’s Cassandra. Disasters and Heroes is a thought-provoking collection dealing with issues of major significance which recent events have made painfully topical.
281 pages | 8 2/5 x 5 2/5 | © 2004
Political Science: Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, and International Relations
Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction
Acknowledgements
1 COMMEMORATIONS
Meditation on Memorials
D-Day 1994
The Wars of Ian Hamilton Finlay
2 WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR?
Campaign Honours: The American Revolution
Civil War Soldiers
Britain’s Good War
GIs: The American Occupation of Britain 1942-1945
Mass-Observation’s War
New Zealand Women at War
The People’s Peace
Terence Rattigan’s Deep Blue Sea
3 REPRESENTATIONS OF WAR
The Hero from Homer to Now
T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Writing in the Sky: Battle of Britain Memoirs
Mr Wu and the Colonials: the British Empire’s Evacuation from Crete, 1941
Scottish Poets in the Desert
Art and War
The New Zimbabwe Writing and Chimurenga
Verse and Bosnia
Just a Nasty Kid
Coda: Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and the Future of Epic