ABSTRACT

The International Society for First World War Studies’ ninth conference, ‘War Time’, drew together emerging and leading scholars to discuss, reflect upon, and consider the ways that time has been conceptualised both during the war itself and in subsequent scholarship. War Time: First World War Perspectives on Temporality, stemming from this 2016 conference, offers its readers a collection of the conference’s most inspiring and thought-provoking papers from the next generation of First World War scholars. In its varied yet thematically-related chapters, the book aims to examine new chronologies of the Great War and bring together its military and social history. Its cohesive theme creates opportunities to find common ground and connections between these sub-disciplines of history, and prompts students and academics alike to seriously consider time as alternately a unifying, divisive, and ultimately shaping force in the conflict and its historiography. With content spanning land and air, the home and fighting fronts, multiple nations, and stretching to both pre-1914 and post-1918, these ten chapters by emerging researchers (plus an introductory chapter by the conference organisers, and a foreword by John Horne) offer an irreplaceable and invaluable snapshot of how the next generation of First World War scholars from eight countries were innovatively conceptualising the conflict and its legacy at the midpoint of its centenary. 

 

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

part I|76 pages

Speed, pacing, and suspension

chapter 1|22 pages

No time to waste

How German military authorities attempted to speed up the recovery of soldiers in home-front hospitals, 1914–1918

chapter 2|15 pages

Fast therapy and fast recovery

The role of time for the Italian neuropsychiatric service in the war zones

chapter 3|19 pages

A stitch in time

Inefficiency and the appeal of patriotic work in Australia and Canada

chapter 4|19 pages

Slow going

Wartime affect and small press modernism

part II|65 pages

Reorientation and memory

chapter 5|21 pages

“It is at night-time that we notice most of the changes in our life caused by the war”

War-time, Zeppelins, and children’s experience of the Great War in London

chapter 6|21 pages

Time, space, and death

Germany’s living and lost aviators of the First World War

chapter 7|22 pages

The photo albums of the First World War

Composing and practising the images of the time of destruction

part III|66 pages

Relationship between past, present, and future

chapter 8|21 pages

Brothers – and sons – in arms

First World War memory, the life cycle, and generational shifts during the Second World War

chapter 9|18 pages

Between passatism and futurism

The rites of consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in a transnational perspective (1914–1919)

chapter 10|26 pages

Hoping for victorious peace

Morale and the future on the Western Front, 1914–1918