This is the first book to study the cultural impact of the Armistice of
11 November 1918. It contains fourteen new essays from scholars working
in literature, music, art history and military history. The book looks
comparatively at British, German and Austrian works, covering authors
such as Elizabeth Bowen, Alfred Döblin, Ford Madox Ford, Philip Gibbs,
C. E. Montague, Arthur Schnitzler, Helen Zenna Smith, and Virginia
Woolf; composers such as Arthur Bliss and Ernst Krenek; artists Käthe
Kollwitz, Käte Lassen, Wyndham Lewis, Lotte Prechner and John Singer
Sargent. The chapters discuss the ways in which the war was memorialised
in military cemeteries and art exhibitions, and how journals such as the
Times Literary Supplement and the Bookman engaged with the Armistice and
its aftermath. Together the essays offer new ways of thinking about the
hopes and disappointments which accompanied the end of the First World
War. 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 that moment of silence
and asks how its effect was to echo into the following decades. The
essays are genuinely interdisciplinary and are written in a clear,
accessible style. The book is aimed at students and academics working on
the First World War, as well as students of early twentieth-century
literature, music and art history. It will also appeal to general
readers interested in the war. Contributors include distinguished First
World War scholars Jane Potter, Claudia Siebrecht, George Simmers and
Alexander Watson.
