War is often lived through and remembered as a time of heightened emotional intensity. This edited collection places the emotions of war centre stage. It explores emotional responses in particular wartime locations, maps national and transnational emotional cultures, and proposes new ways of deploying emotion as an analytical device.
Whilst grief and fear are among the emotions most immediately associated with the rhetoric, experience, and memory of war, this collection suggests that feelings such as love, shame, pride, jealousy, anger, and resentment also merit attention. This book explores the status and uses of emotion as a category of historical and contemporaneous analysis. It goes beyond the cataloguing of discrete feelings to consider the use of emotion to understand the past. It considers the emotional agency of historical actors and the contexts, modes, and time frames in which they communicated their feelings. Wartime provides a dynamic context for thinking through the possibilities and limitations of the emotional approach.
This collection provides case studies that explain how emotional registers respond to world events. These range from First World War Germany, interwar France, and Second World War Britain to the Greek Civil War and to the post-war world. Several chapters trace the emotional legacy of war across different conflicts and to the present day: they show how past, present, and possible futures intersect in the emotions of a moment. They also reveal links between the intimate, the national, and the international, between interiority and sociality, and between conflict and its aftermath.