The First World War is called “Great” only among the British. This circumstance underlines its enduring importance for British spiritual, political and everyday culture. The conceptualization of historical events as an act of forming cultural memory, a form of presenting a significant past and its cultural heritage is considered in this article on the basis of the methodology of memory studies and heritage studies, its new direction — critical heritage studies. Within the framework of the latter, cultural heritage is interpreted as a process of permanent rethinking and redefinition of the cultural values of the past, which includes various social actors. The influential participants in this process are researchers: culturologists, historians, literary scholars, sociologists, who not only influence collective ideas about the events of the past, but also interpret their contemporary significance. Accordingly, from a huge number of works devoted to the Great War memorialization the authors of the article focus on those that consider the interaction of various forms of memory and their influence on the evolution of the collective memory of the British; they are created in the mainstream of the historical science of culture and distinguished by a pronounced historical and anthropological approach. The article identifies several conceptual approaches in the development of the problems of the cultural heritage and the memory of the war, analyzes the achievements in a comparative study of the image of war and its evolution in the cultural memory of the British, in studying the interaction of the official and popular, collective and individual forms of war memory, general and specific features of the British and foreign traditions of memory about the First World War. It also interprets the significance of the revisionist historiography in changing the notions of the Great War heritage.
Cultural memory, teaching and contemporary writing about the First World War
