A meditation on how militaristic commemoration continues to influence attitudes towards war and increase the liklihood of more wars being fought in the future. Since the Spartans did not initially commemorate their wars as acts of liberation or altrusim, leading in the beginning to fewer rather than more wars, we should reconsider framing our wars as virtuous and selfless campaigns to help others, at least if we want wars to stop occurring.

This contribution traces the singular significance of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy for Sebald’s literary as well as literary critical writings. It offers a discussion of Sebald’s adaptation of Benjaminian theorems and reflections, focussing in particular on the philosophy of history, conceptions of natural history, the epistemological functionalization of melancholia, and a materialist understanding of memory.

This chapter argues that the Linguistic Landscape (LL) brings together orientations towards past, present, and future in complex ways which distinguish it from other forms of discourse and from language in the grammatical sense. In this analysis, every unit of the LL points to a past act of a sign instigator which is viewed in the framework of present relevance but which also points toward states and actions in a relative future. This complexity determines that each unit in the LL carries its own temporal frame of reference, which may include direct reference to time, time inflections that allow for stylistic means of invoking additional notions of time, and the unit time which follows as a consequence of the unit’s physical features. From this perspective, it is argued that there is no single present in the LL, but, rather, that the LL encompasses a flow of different – sometimes contradictory – temporal references. Fieldwork examples from six countries illustrate the operation in the LL of historical ghost signage and remnants, changes in street naming policies, tourism, nostalgia and repurposing, historical commemoration, and discourse features of political graffiti.

The poetry designated ‘non-combatant’ comes from a hugely disparate group. This chapter explores its range and diversity, illustrating how even those designated ‘non-combatant’ necessarily had their lives circumscribed by war. The poetry contests the assumption that non-combatant meant a naive response to the war that saw it in terms of adventure and sanitised sacrifice. Although this perspective exists, anxiety and loss are dominant themes, and many non-combatants attempted to understand the combatant experience. Others draw on their immediate domestic environment to contest the war, or to consider their peripheral position on the home front. Poetry can articulate the bitterness of those who felt excluded from participation, or the political stance of conscientious objectors asserting the validity of their position. Others, such as nurses, use their poetry to bear witness to suffering, and to memorialise non-combatant women who died in the service of their country.

A History of World War One Poetry aims to represent the global and multifaceted poetry that emerged from 1914–1918. While poetry did and does not occupy the same place in all national imaginaries, it was a literary genre that flourished during the Great War.The Introduction interrogates not only the term ‘war poetry’ but also the question of ‘who is entitled to write war poetry’.It argues that the poetry that emerged from World War One extended far beyond the British soldier-poet canon, reinforced by influential studies such as Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. Rather, as the chapters demonstrate, it was generated and read by men and by women, combatant and non-combatant, and across a continuum in which protest and patriotism, modernity and tradition, propaganda and remembrance, humour and pathos, co-existed, if uneasily.

World War I triggered a memorial boom unparalleled in US history as constituencies of every stripe rushed to commemorate the role of “their boys” in the conflict. The memorials, numbering in the thousands, assumed both traditional forms and myriad new guises, including the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a host of unprecedented “useful memorials”—such as bridges, community centers, and football stadiums—whose commemorative suitability was hotly debated. “Great men” sculptures were eschewed while honor rolls of the dead became ubiquitous. Well-known artists created powerful sculptural memorials, including some that evinced disillusionment with the war, but most memorial sculpture—to the chagrin of the art world—comprised commercially produced doughboys, often in heroic poses. Despite their omnipresence, the memorials largely failed to fix the war’s place in American memory: No commemorative form could sufficiently compensate for the war’s ambiguous narrative and unsettled meaning, especially in the wake of US participation in the Second World War. The centennial period has brought renewed attention to World War I memorials and has catalyzed an effort to erect a national World War I memorial in Washington, DC.

World War I’s legacy is most obvious in Europe, which it left with more small states dependent upon international organizations for their security. Wilson’s League of Nations – minus his own United States – failed to provide that security, leading many interwar Europeans to blame his compromised idealism for the rise of fascism and another world war. In the long run, however, Wilson’s ideals of self-determination, democracy, collective security, and an international rule of law were embodied in the European Union. Beyond Europe, the war transformed the Middle East by encouraging Zionism, Arab nationalism, and the Turkish model of secularism, along with the Islamist backlash against all three. Farther afield, it spawned communist movements that eventually took over in China and Vietnam, as well as the Indian and Pakistani nationalism that divided south Asia. For countries whose losses in World War II did not approach those of World War I – Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, along with France and Italy – the remembrance and commemoration of World War I remains a part of national life. For Germany, Russia, the United States, and Japan, World War II became the more historically significant experience, for its role in making or breaking those countries as world powers.

This chapter offers a critical overview of historical, cultural, and literary debates around ‘Windrush’. It revisits how the boat’s arrival in 1948 has come to represent the ‘beginnings’ of multicultural Britain and the consequent reshaping of the nation’s identity. It examines which factors influenced the writers and works that came to prominence and gained an enduring currency as Windrush narratives; it also attends to works that have been less celebrated. The particular focus of the chapter is on how the construction of the Windrush experience within literary works has aligned with wider political narratives to emphasise the ongoing challenges around the recognition and accommodation of black subjects within British culture and society. The chapter addresses two important blind spots within the literary framing of the Windrush experience: writings that emphasise transnational attachments and cultural mobility, as well as writings by women.