Healing the nation is a study of caregiving during the Great War, exploring life behind the lines for ordinary British soldiers who served on the Western Front. Using a variety of literary, artistic, and architectural evidence, this study draws connections between the war machine and the wartime culture of caregiving: the product of medical knowledge and procedure, social relationships and health institutions that informed experiences of rest, recovery and rehabilitation in sites administered by military and voluntary-aid authorities. Rest huts, hospitals, and rehabilitation centres served...

Italy's declaration of war on Britain in June 1940 had devastating consequences for Italian immigrant families living in Scotland signalling their traumatic construction as the 'enemy other'. Through an analysis of personal testimonies and previously unpublished archival material, this book takes a case study of a long-established immigrant group and explores how notions of belonging and citizenship are undermined at a time of war.
Overall, this book considers how wartime events affected the construction or Italian identity in Britain. It makes a groundbreaking and original contribution...

The most up-to-date and comprehensive English-language study of its kind, From victory to Vichy explores the political mobilisation of the two largest French veterans' associations during the interwar years, the Union federale (UF) and the Union nationale des combattants (UNC). Drawing on extensive research into the associations' organisation, policies and tactics, this study argues that French veterans were more of a threat to democracy than previous scholarship has allowed. As France descended into crisis, the UF and the UNC sought to extend their influence into the non-veteran milieu...

Civvies explores the experiences of middle-class men on the English home front during the First World War. Although the conflict continues to attract enormous interest, most attention remains focused on the experiences of servicemen, rather than the majority of adult men who were not enlisted into the armed forces: we still know very little about those men who spent the war years on the home front. This book thus focuses on those middle-class English men who did not join the armed forces not because of moral or political objections to war, but for a variety of other (much more common)...

This is the first book to study the cultural impact of the Armistice of 11 November 1918. It contains 14 new essays from scholars working in literature, music, art history and military history. The Armistice brought hopes for a better future, as well as sadness, disappointment and rage. Many people in all the combatant nations asked hard questions about the purpose of the war. These questions are explored in complex and nuanced ways in the literature, music and art of the period. This book revisits the silence of the Armistice and asks how its effect was to echo into the following decades....

French crime fiction and the Second World War explores France's preoccupation with memories of the Second World War through an examination of popular culture in one of its most enduring forms: crime fiction. A populist literary form, French crime fiction offers fascinating insights into past and present perceptions of the war years in France, as well as the role that popular culture has played in both shaping and reflecting cultural memories of the Occupation. By analyzing representations of the war years in a selection of French crime novels from the late 1940s to the 2000s, this study...

Italy's declaration of war on Britain in June 1940 had devastating consequences for Italian immigrant families living in Scotland signalling their traumatic construction as the 'enemy other'. Through an analysis of personal testimonies and previously unpublished archival material, this book takes a case study of a long-established immigrant group and explores how notions of belonging and citizenship are undermined at a time of war. Overall, this book considers how wartime events affected the construction or Italian identity in Britain. It makes a groundbreaking and original contribution to...

John Galsworthy - recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize for literature - was one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century. His literary reputation overshadows what he achieved during the Great War, which was his humanitarian support for and his compositions about soldiers disabled in the conflict. John Galsworthy and disabled soldiers of the Great War represents the most comprehensive study published to date about this literature of the 'war to end all wars.' It makes available for the first time in a single edition the most significant of his compositions about disabled soldiers,...

Civilians into soldiers is an examination of British Army life during the Second World War. Drawing on a wealth of official records and servicemen's personal testimonies it explores the ways in which male civilians were turned into soldiers through the techniques by which they were inducted into military culture. Newlands argues that their bodies were central to this process. Using strict physical regimes, the military authorities sorted men into bodily types that reflected their cultural assumptions and sought to transform them into figures that they imagined to be ideal. However, soldiers'...