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

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Mar 5, 1998 - History - 310 pages
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. 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.

From inside the book

Contents

Homecomings the return of the dead
15
Communities in mourning
29
Spiritualism and the Lost Generation
54
War memorials and the mourning process
78
Cultural codes and languages of mourning
117
Mythologies of war films popular religion and the business of the sacred
119
The apocalyptic imagination in art from anticipation to allegory
145
The apocalyptic imagination in war literature
178
War poetry romanticism and the return of the sacred
204
Conclusion
223
Notes
230
Bibliography
273
Index
298
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 4 - It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.