Exhibiting War: The Great War, Museums, and Memory in Britain, Canada, and Australia: 53 (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, Series Number 53)
Cambridge University Press, 9/21/2017
EAN 9781107135079, ISBN10: 1107135079
Hardcover, 366 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
What does it mean to display war? Examining a range of different exhibitions in Britain, Canada and Australia, Jennifer Wellington reveals complex imperial dynamics in the ways these countries developed diverging understandings of the First World War, despite their cultural, political and institutional similarities. While in Britain a popular narrative developed of the conflict as a tragic rupture with the past, Australia and Canada came to see it as engendering national birth through violence. Narratives of the war's meaning were deliberately constructed by individuals and groups pursuing specific agendas: to win the war and immortalise it at the same time. Drawing on a range of documentary and visual material, this book analyses how narratives of mass violence changed over time. Emphasising the contingent development of national and imperial war museums, it illuminates the way they acted as spaces in which official, academic and popular representations of this violent past intersect.
Part I
1. In search of the 'authentic' experience of war, 1914–17
Part II
2. Exhibiting for victory
travelling war photography displays, 1917–20
3. Art exhibitions
a higher truth in aid of victory and for posterity
4. Taming the monsters of war
exhibiting weapons and war trophies 1917–20
Part III
5. Consolidations
creating national museums and narratives of war, 1920–35
6. Museums, monuments, and memory
exhibiting war as part of national and imperial commemorative projects since 1925.