Martin Löschnigg - Böcker

The twenty-seven original contributions to this volume investigate the ways in which the First World War has been commemorated and represented internationally in prose fiction, drama, film, docudrama and comics from the 1960s until the present. The volume thus provides a comprehensive survey of the cultural memory of the war as reflected in various media across national cultures, addressing the complex connections between the cultural post-memory of the war and its mediation. In four sections, the essays investigate (1) the cultural legacy of the Great War (including its mythology and iconography); (2) the implications of different forms and media for representing the war; (3) ‘national’ memories, foregrounding the differences in post-memory representations and interpretations of the Great War, and (4) representations of the Great War within larger temporal or spatial frameworks, focusing specifically on the ideological dimensions of its ‘remembrance’ in historical, socio-political, gender-oriented, and post-colonial contexts.

The twenty-seven original contributions to this volume investigate the ways in which the First World War has been commemorated and represented internationally in prose fiction, drama, film, docudrama and comics from the 1960s until the present. The volume thus provides a comprehensive survey of the cultural memory of the war as reflected in various media across national cultures, addressing the complex connections between the cultural post-memory of the war and its mediation. In four sections, the essays investigate (1) the cultural legacy of the Great War (including its mythology and iconography); (2) the implications of different forms and media for representing the war; (3) ‘national’ memories, foregrounding the differences in post-memory representations and interpretations of the Great War, and (4) representations of the Great War within larger temporal or spatial frameworks, focusing specifically on the ideological dimensions of its ‘remembrance’ in historical, socio-political, gender-oriented, and post-colonial contexts.

While filmic representations of ‘enemies’ are legion, film studies have so far neglected the way in which filmic mediations of enemy images have contributed to shaping cultural memories. The present volume investigates the (de)(re)constructions of enemy images in international film since the 1970s. The three parts deal with (re)configurations of the enemy in contemporary global cinemas, analysing films on the two world wars, on regional military conflicts, ethnic, racial and gender conflicts, socio-political conflicts and forms of terrorism. The essays concentrate on film aesthetics and contemporary (geo)politics, on filmic renderings of identity crises caused by troubled national pasts, and on the way films explore the collective psychological mechanisms at play in the construction, perpetuation or problematizing of enemy images. The volume aims to show how in spite of the diversity of national cinemas, moving images are constitutive of national collectivities by rendering conflicts involving an external or internal enemy as the defining points in national or communal histories. It also points out how the dynamics of internalism and exteriority (of ‘we’ and ‘they’) has proved vital in this process.