Commemorative Acts

Susan McCready is a professor of French and the co-director of the Center for the Study of War and Memory at the University of South Alabama.

"Whereas the cultural memory of the Great War in France is dominated by novels and cinema, in this eminently readable book, Susan McCready recovers the rich but largely forgotten corpus of interwar plays that represent and responded to generational divides and changing attitudes to the war. Against the background of a transitional time in French history, McCready escorts us through an equally transitional time in aesthetics: from the classical "pièce bien faite" to realist, modernist and stylized experimental theatre. Commemorative Acts fills an important gap in French literary and cultural history and promises to be a key reference work for scholars and students of the interwar period in France."- Sima Godfrey, Associate Professor Emerita of French, University of British Columbia and author of The Crimean War and Cultural Memory: The War France Won and Forgot "Just when one might have thought that the long vibrant field of World War I cultural studies was petering out, a book like Commemorative Acts comes along to show us that this is not the case. Finally, someone has tackled the vast and neglected topic of the theatre's role in France’s collective understanding of the Great War. In this penetrating and eloquent analysis, the noted historian of French theater Susan McCready charts new scholarly territory at the intersection of theater theatre studies, memory studies and the cultural history of the war. This book needed to be written, and McCready was the person to do it."- Leon Sachs, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Kentucky "McCready has unearthed a treasure trove of theatrical riches from the French stage of the interwar years. Her lucid and sensitive analysis allows us to understand properly for the first time the role of drama in performing the national cultural memory of the First World War for a France both victorious and devastated."- Nicholas White, Professor of Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Broadening the Scope of Great War Memory1. Coming to Terms with Memory: French War Theatre to 19282. Displacements: French War Theatre 1928 to 19373. Bearing Witness: Experience and Illusion in Interwar Theatre4. Classical Form and Modernist Fracture in Interwar TheatreConclusion: The Ongoing Work of MemoryWar Plays AppendixNotesBibliographyIndex