Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration

The Great War continues to play a prominent role in contemporary consciousness. With commemorative activities involving seventy-two countries, its centenary is a titanic undertaking: not only ‘the centenary to end all centenaries’ but the first truly global period of remembrance. In this innovative volume, the authors examine First World War commemoration in an international, multidisciplinary and comparative context. The contributions draw on history, politics, geography, cultural studies and sociology to interrogate the continuities and tensions that have shaped national commemoration and the social and political forces that condition this unique international event. New studies of Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific address the relationship between increasingly fractured grand narratives of history and the renewed role of the state in mediating between individual and collective memories. Released to coincide with the beginning of the 2014–2018 centenary period, this collection illuminates the fluid and often contested relationships amongst nation, history and memory in Great War commemoration.

Author Biography

Shanti Sumartojo is a Research Fellow in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University. She is the author of Trafalgar Square and the Narration of Britishness, 1900-2012: Imagining the Nation (Peter Lang, 2013). Ben Wellings is a Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University Centre for European Studies. He has also held fellowships at the London School of Economics, the European University Institute and Huddersfield University. He is the author of English Nationalism and Euroscepticism: Losing the Peace (Peter Lang, 2012).