The Introduction begins by considering two dominant critical approaches to the graphic novel. While prominent authors have denied the relevance of the concept, instead preferring the term comics, many scholars have sought to align the graphic novel with prestigious literature. The chapter identifies the practical and institutional resources that the term provides, tracing the evolution of book-length comics under this mantle. Section 1.1 considers the relevance of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel for understanding the graphic novel and puts forward a new periodization of the latter. The first cycle, lasting from 1980 to 2000, centers on the book for the first time in US comics history. Starting in the early 2000s, integration into the literary marketplace initiates a second cycle that effects several important changes, from an increase in the use of color to a diversification of visual styles. Engaging with recent work in cultural sociology and political economy, Section 1.2 situates the aesthetic evolution of the graphic novel in the ongoing transformation of contemporary society.

Guillaume Apollinaire is without doubt the most prolific French poet of the Great War. In addition to his major poetry collection, Calligrammes (1918), he wrote and published plays, stories, journalism, and criticism during the conflict. His writing is nothing if not wide ranging. He considered poetry a spiritual activity and an escape from the traditional classification of genre. He also believed there was no boundary between art and life – the two are inextricably linked – and, further, that art and life transform one another. This porous nature, not without its ambivalences and paradoxes, constitutes a major key to the interpretation of his work. The diversity and originality of his oeuvre, the trajectory of the author and the importance of his legacy help to explain how and why he became a poet of war in France, a country that ignored the tradition of 'war poets' that had developed in Great Britain.

Wampum beads are small beads made out of shellfish, typically the quahog clam, which were traditionally used by various First Nations in acts of ceremony, memory, and exchange. Often placed together on strings or woven into large belts displaying patterns, wampum was exchanged among various Indigenous nations of the Eastern Seaboard and beyond. It became a very important trade object with Europeans, who spread its use across colonial economies. For British writers in the eighteenth century, it was a perplexing material; for some it was understood as a form of currency, roughly translatable to a European economic system of monetary exchange.  Others understood wampum as writing, not legible to the European but which contained in its strings of beads a cultural history or account of a treaty negotiation, or more simply a pledge of fidelity. Its additional use as an object of adornment further complicated any stable understanding; as both text and commodity, sacred pact and ornament, wampum conflated systems of meaning and challenged European epistemologies. This chapter will look at various interpretations of wampum and will assess the epistemological challenges it placed to a society in which the lines between finance and culture were becoming increasingly blurred.

The civilian gas mask made total war seem normal. As an object that could remind wearers of an existential threat to their lives and families and livelihoods while being carried on the body, the gas mask could encapsulate both the warfare state and the welfare state of the twentieth century. A government that freely distributed civilian gas masks made it acceptable to factor its noncombatant population fully into the waging of modern war.

In the middle of the 1930s, Britain released its first formal statement about air raid precautions (civil defense) and acknowledged that it could offer no guarantee of immunity for civilians in a future war that might involve both air power and chemical weapons. At the start of the decade, Britain had begun to create civil defense for chemical warfare by cultivating first aid for civilians facing chemical arms and continuing to test both chemical weapons and anti-gas protection. It had not yet decided whether to provide gas masks to its entire civilian population. The official release of civil defense measures in 1935 led to vocal opposition from a variety of groups including feminists, socialists, scientists, and religious pacifists like Quakers. Then, the return of the use of chemical weapons in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36 dramatically altered the public conversation about the use of such weapons and the devices to protect against them. The return of aerial bombardment to Europe with the Spanish Civil War alongside the use of chemical arms served as a catalyst for developing anti-gas protection as a key component of civil defense preparations for the war to come.

Chapter 2 shows how the arrival of lethal chemical warfare at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915 led to the invention of anti-gas protection. It traces the crucial role played by women in this initial process and how the prospect of gas masks for civilians slowly emerged during the First World War and then continued in the war’s aftermath. The prospect of a future war of aero-chemical annihilation motivated feminist antimilitarists and others demanding the curtailment of chemical arms. Nonetheless Britain continued in both the metropole and empire to develop both such weapons and equipment to protect individuals from poison gas. Chemical weapons also had defenders, and the debate over their legitimacy played out in public even as government officials, who were inventing civil defense in secret in the 1920s, incorporated individual anti-gas protection into their calculations.

The trial run of civil defence and the gas mask in September 1938 yielded several important lessons for the government. One was that it urgently needed to solve the absence of anti-gas protection for infants and toddlers, which it did by the time Britain entered the Second World War in September 1939. Until the outbreak of war, it continued to encounter resistance to these measures, and when war broke out, some conscientious objectors used their refusal to accept their gas masks as a sign of their commitment to oppose all war. As for the majority who accepted the mask as the gift of a benevolent state, the issue became whether or not they would follow instructions to carry them whenever they left their homes. The government soon came to see gas mask carrying not only as a mark of good morale, but also as indicating whether or not someone was being a good wartime citizen, willing to follow instructions in order to keep the entire civilian population safe. Mass Observation delegated respondents to survey who carried their masks, and they recorded these efforts as mapping onto attitudes towards the war effort. When the worst of the Battle of Britain had subsided with a decrease in devastating aerial attacks by April 1941, the government launched a concerted campaign, using posters, film, and staged gas mask drills to encourage the population to remember that “Hitler Will Give No Warning,” so everyone had to accept the obligation always to have a gas mask at the ready. Carrying and caring for the gas mask became a sign that you accepted your duty to participate in the war effort.

The Introduction sets out the rationale for a study of the social and cultural impact of religious difference after the Toleration Act, and emphasises the wide-ranging social impact of religious difference in this period. By outlining the potentially far-reaching influence of this difference across English society, the introduction suggests that while the legal, political, and institutional implications of the Toleration Act have long been a subject of historical interest, this legislation also had social and cultural ramifications that demand sustained attention. Engaging with social, cultural, and religious histories of the eighteenth century, the introduction further points to the argument at the heart of the book: that looking at the social consequences of religious difference in this period changes our understanding of the cultural tenor of English society.

In the interwar period, the issue of how much space capitalism left for human agency preoccupied many Germans. Would they be able to revolutionize or reform this economic order, or were they compelled to work and live within it? This chapter argues that capitalism proved remarkably capable of confining individual, collective, and governmental agency. Therefore, expectations of transformation were often disappointed or scaled back, as the first section shows. The second section examines more tacit ways of adapting to a capitalist logic, while the third turns to the attempts of Chancellor Hermann Brüning’s two cabinets to steer Germany through the economic depression. Brüning was caught between calls for decisive leadership, doubts about the effectiveness of government intervention, and a rapidly shifting situation. Adolf Hitler, by contrast, promised to restore human control over the economy. After 1933, his regime loudly claimed to have transcended capitalism while inconspicuously exploiting its logic.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

Chapter 1 introduces the book in three ways: (1) by explaining the way French theatre life was organised; (2) by selected cultural overviews; (3) by comparing past and present attitudes to popular opera. After a preamble that defines genre terms used in the book, the institutional context is sketched out with reference to legal frameworks governing the ‘official’ stage, contrasted with the difficulties of popular opera. This was independent and commercial, active during the winter Fair (Saint Germain) and summer Fair (Saint Laurent) in Paris. In ‘Structures, Events and Systems’ popular theatre forms, including parodies, vaudevilles and marionette pieces, are related to legal imperatives. ‘Reflections of Society’ links popular opera to cultural contexts: events in French society; prose fiction; the tableau in theatre; and critical debates in the public sphere. ‘Chamfort’s Overview’ is an account of the most sophisticated generic definition of popular opera as it was understood before the Revolution. ‘Defending Popular Opera’ re-examines Pierre Nougaret’s problematic book De l’art du théâtre. ‘Conceptual Problems’ takes Sedaine and Monsigny’s Le Déserteur, once famous across Europe, as a case study in reception history of opéra-comique. Evidence suggests that understanding is more sought after than satisfied.