Session Abstract

During the 100^th anniversary of the First World War, numerous scholarly gatherings will seek to frame this conflict for a new century and to interrogate the tropes by which historians have come to understand total war.  The participants in this session hope to enrich and complicate these conversations by using literary and anthropological tools to shed new light on how the history of war has been written and might be rewritten in future.  Thus, in this panel, three cultural historians of Britain’s 20^th-century total wars seek to use interdisciplinary tools to excavate the broader cultural and social implications of wars waged as much at home as on a battleground someplace else.  Drawing on the concepts of spectrality and hauntology as deployed by poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida and Fredric Jameson  (and reinforced by Freudian psychoanalysis), Martin Francis’s’ paper uses the notion of the ghost to highlight the disavowals and confinements that continue to characterize much of the historical writing about 1914-1918. Lucy Noakes investigates how the spectre of the Great War was reshaped via the major symbolic, recurring moment of commemoration in interwar Britain, the ceremonies taking place on Armistice Day each November. Using Mass Observation records—tools devised by social scientists to record everyday life—Noakes uncovers the range of emotional and political responses to embodied grief.  Finally, Susan Grayzel builds on insights offered by anthropologists such as Daniel Miller and Arjun Appadurai on materiality and the social life of things to delineate how one material object—the civilian gas mask—offers an innovative way to understand the long shadow cast by the First World War’s introduction of chemical warfare.  For the decision to develop a device produced and distributed by the state to product the individual non-combatant body demonstrates a new understanding of the parameters of warfare in twentieth-century Britain.  All three papers will explore how history benefits from being in conversation with other disciplines that enrich our understanding of total war and its long afterlife.  Gill Plain, a literary scholar and critic with expertise in writing about British writers and the Second World War, will chair the session and provide commentary on how new cultural histories of Britain’s wars at home may be written in future.