The First World War

Educated in Kolkata and Cambridge, Santanu Das teaches in the English Department at King's College London. He is the author of the award-winning monograph Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2006) and Indian Troops in Europe, 1914-1918 (2014) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (2006). He has been involved in a number of centennial commemorative projects on the war, from radio and television programmes with the BBC to advising on concerts, exhibitions, and, most recently, dance-theatre. Kate McLoughlin is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She previously taught at Birkbeck, University of London, and the University of Glasgow. Her publications include CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011) and Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790-2015 (2018). She is the co-founding director of WAR-Net, an international, inter-disciplinary network of scholars working on war representation, and co-general editor of Edinburgh Critical Studies in War & Culture.

All eleven essays and the introduction are well written and deploy a variety of approaches to the vast topic proposed in the volume's title; each essay, moreover, demonstrates a thorough knowledge of its particular subfield. The volume itself is handsome and, unlike many essay collections, includes an index. The authors and editors deserve praise for selecting essays that expand on the cannon of war literature beyond the well-known combatant-poets and for moving beyond the literary to include film and the plastic arts...There is a great deal of merit in this very fine contribution to the field of First World War literary studies.

• List of figuresNotes on contributorsPreface and acknowledgementsIntroductionPart One: Unfathomable1: Kate McLoughlin: Three War Veterans Who Don't Tell War Stories2: Hope Wolf: Scaling War: Poetic Calibration and Mythic Measures in David Jones's In Parenthesis 3: Vincent Sherry: Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economy of 'Sacrifice' in the Great WarPart Two: Scoping the War4: Sarah Cole: Civilians Writing the War: Metaphor, Proximity, Action5: Laura Marcus: First World War Film and the Face of Death6: Christine Froula: The Zeppelin in the Sky of the Mind7: Mark Rawlinson: Dissent and the Literature of the First World War: Wyndham Lewis and Henry WilliamsonPart Three: 'Cosmopolitan Sympathies'?8: Jahan Ramazani: 'Cosmopolitan Sympathies': Poetry of the First Global War9: Margaret Higonnet: Maternal Cosmopoetics: Käthe Kollwitz and European Women Poets of the First World War10: Claire Buck: Encountering War, Encountering Others11: Santanu Das: Entangled Emotions: Race, Encounters and Anti-Colonial CosmopolitanismIndex