Dr Jane Potter

Situating First World War poetry in a truly global context, this book reaches beyond the British soldier-poet canon. A History of World War One Poetry examines popular and literary, ephemeral and enduring poems that the cataclysm of 1914-1918 inspired. Across Europe, poets wrestled with the same problem: how to represent a global conflict, dominated by modern technology, involving millions of combatants and countless civilians. For literary scholars this has meant discovering and engaging with the work of men and women writing in other languages, on other fronts, and from different national perspectives. Poems are presented in their original languages and in English translations, some for the very first time, while a Coda reflects on the study and significance of First World War poetry in the wake of the Centenary. A History of World War One Poetry offers a new perspective on the literary and human experience of 1914-1918.

The First World War has given rise to a multifaceted cultural production like no other historical event. This handbook surveys British literature and film about the war from 1914 until today. The continuing interest in World War I highlights the interdependence of war experience, the imaginative re-creation of that experience in writing, and individual as well as collective memory. In the first part of the handbook, the major genres of war writing and film are addressed, including of course poetry and the novel, but also the short story; furthermore, it is shown how our conception of the Great War is broadened when looked at from the perspective of gender studies and post-colonial criticism. The chapters in the second part present close readings of important contributions to the literary and filmic representation of World War I in Great Britain. All in all, the contributions demonstrate how the opposing forces of focusing and canon-formation on the one hand, and broadening and revision of the canon on the other, have characterised British literature and culture of the First World War.

Working in a world of hurt fills a significant gap in the studies of the psychological trauma wrought by war. It focuses not on soldiers, but on the men and women who fought to save them in casualty clearing stations, hospitals and prison camps. The writings by doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and other medical personnel reveal the spectrum of their responses that range from breakdown to resilience. Through a rich analysis of both published and unpublished personal from the First World War in the early twentieth century to Iraq in the early twenty-first, Acton and Potter put centre stage the letters, diaries, memoirs and weblogs that have chronicled physical and emotional suffering, many for the first time. Wide-ranging in scope, interdisciplinary in method, and written in a scholarly yet accessible style, Working in a world of hurt is essential reading for lecturers and students as well as the general reader.

The United States occupied a unique position between 1914 and 1918: fi rst as a seemingly detached spectator and second as a crusading participant. Yet it is this supreme confi dence in the country’s mission “to vindicate the principles of peace and the justice in the life of the world as against selfi sh and autocratic power” (we hear resonances today2) that marks the particularly American response to the “war to end all war.” Naive in its assuredness, evangelical in its outlook, the sense of mission is refl ected in the writings of American noncombatant witnesses, particularly nurses. Now largely forgotten, a significant corpus of writing exists, published and unpublished. Previous scholarly studies have tended to focus on a limited number of what may be considered canonical works, such as Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929) and Ellen La Motte’s The Backwash of War (1916), both of which are considered elsewhere in this volume. This chapter, however, seeks to illuminate less wellknown writings, by less famous women. Published accounts and letters home to family served to enlighten a distant American public - “distant” both in geography and in mind.  Published memoirs in particular sought to encourage financial support for various aid associations and, above all, to bear witness to the suffering of the fighting men. Their role as pro-war, pro-Allies propaganda should also not be underestimated. Indeed, they formed part of the unofficial means by which the country became convinced of the need for its involvement in this European conflict. This chapter will explore how, despite all the self-conscious certainty that the US is the beacon of light for the world, these memoirs and letters are decidedly more contradictory and multifaceted than a first glance at the assured exterior would indicate.