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This special issue on war writing consists of articles based on presentations at the War in Estonian Culture, Literature and History conference held 15–16 December 2022 at the Estonian Literary Museum. The conference focused on the question of the lasting influence and meaning of the two world wars in Estonian culture, literature and history writing. These questions were underscored by the Russian–Ukrainian war which broke out in February 2022 and which actualised memory of the Second World War, the commemoration of its victims, and a weighing of the consequences, influence and meanings of the war for different memory communities. Anniversaries of historical events that have changed world history call for new scholarly perspectives on the past. Thus, in recent years, in connection with the 100th anniversary of the First World War, studies of related topics have become more frequent, including in Estonia. The article collection The First World War in Estonian Culture (2015) is the first step toward an investigation of the representations of the First World War in Estonian culture. In these studies, diaries and letters have particular value. Surviving private letters permit a better understanding of this great war and its meaning for Estonians mobilised for it. From the perspective of Estonian history, the most significant result of the First World War was the disintegration of the Russian Empire, which made possible the birth of Estonia – colonised for centuries –, as an independent state. Estonia was one of the nation-states that emerged from the disintegration of empires. In 2018, based on the Estonian experience and in an international framework, Anu Raudsepp and Tõnu Tannberg presented our perspective on the influence of the First World War on the creation of nation-states and resultant challenges to the writing of history textbooks. Though the independent Estonian republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1918, the declaration was followed by German occupation in 1918 and the defence of Estonia’s freedom against Soviet Russia in the War of Independence of 1918–1920. The 100th anniversary of the War of Independence also inspired new scholarly research. In 2019 Tõnu Tannberg edited a collection of articles entitled The Many Faces of the War of Independence. The 100th anniversary of the Tartu peace treaty was marked in 2020 by the publication of collective research by historians in a two-volume magisterial work on the history of the War of Independence. The Second World War has been deemed the largest catastrophe in history caused by human hands, during which 60 or 70 million people perished and the destruction changed cityscapes and landscapes beyond recognition. The war reached Estonia in summer 1941 when Soviet occupation was replaced by German occupation. The war years have been represented in the works both of exile writers and writers who remained in Estonia after the war. In Estonian war literature, war poetry has a clear profile, authored by writers who fought in the Second World War on the German side and fled Estonia during the war: Arved Viirlaid, Harri Asi, Kalju Ahven, Einar Sanden, Jyri Kork, Tiit Lehtmets and Eduard Krants. Themes related to war are reflected in the prose of Arved Viirlaid, Ilmar Talve, Ilmar Jaks, Harri Asi, Heino Susi and Agu Kask. Arved Viirlaid’s central work Graves without Crosses I–II (1991, 2009, 2015) is the most popular and most frequently translated work representing the Second World War in Estonian literature. The Tartu cycle by Bernard Kangro and autobiographical short stories by Gunnar Neeme are also remarkable. In Soviet Estonian literature the representation of the Second World War was ideologically constrained; but nevertheless two noteworthy autobiographical war novels were published in the 1970s: Ülo Tuulik’s documentary novel In the Path of War in 1974 (unabridged version 2010) and Juhan Peegel’s I Fell in the First Summer of War in 1979. In addition to belles lettres our historical memory is shaped by autobiographical texts such as memoirs, life stories, autobiographies, letters and diaries, which enable the reader to gain insight into the changes that war brought to everyday life and how people learned to adjust to them. If the memoirs of former combatants have evinced the avoidance of personal points of view and preferences for the matter-of-fact style of reportage, the memoirs and other autobiographical texts of civilians are dominated by the judgments, moods and feelings of the writer as a person. Historical writing on the Second World War is diverse. If from the perspective of western European countries, the main embodiment of evil was Hitler, the situation was much more complicated for eastern European countries. Lack of knowledge of acts of violence committed during the Second World War and later repressions in the countries of eastern Europe and the disregard for international war law by Germany and the Soviet Union have had a significant impact on how the Second World War has been handled in research by historians in Europe and the United States. In most research on the Second World War matters related to the Baltic States are regarded as unimportant compared to the larger processes that took place. Nevertheless, the Baltic states were strategically important both for Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union, making the Baltic question a bone of contention among the allied countries. Over time events that happened in eastern European countries during the Second World War have come increasingly to the fore in scholarly accounts with radically different viewpoints: Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010) by Timothy Snyder, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (2011) by Norman Davies, Soldiers of Memory: Second World War and its Aftermath in Estonian Post-Soviet Life Stories (2011, ed. by Ene Kõresaar). The special issue on war writing contains eight articles on the topic of war, one article on a free topic, a series of translations from the publishing house Loodus, and the archival discovery section in which a letter from the First World War is discussed.

This article explores whether, how, and what young men in interwar Britain heard about the Great War from its veterans. Oral histories are used to enable the first detailed examination of the hitherto largely unexplored topic of the intergenerational transmission of representations of the Great War in interwar Britain. It shows that although many veterans were reticent about their war experiences, young men heard about Great War experiences from veterans more frequently than has previously been acknowledged. What they heard was heterogeneous, like representations in popular culture, but tended to emphasize positive and rewarding elements of wartime service rather than disillusion. While veterans' narratives could be fleeting and ephemeral, this examination of their character shows they should be considered an important component of the wider body of representations of the Great War in interwar popular culture through which young men might 'know' about the Great War. As well as examining what young men heard, consideration is given to alternative ways that young men learned about familial service, and to what triggered veterans' narratives and why some remained silent. Reasons for the trope of the silent veteran are suggested, and its strength in contemporary popular memory is illustrated in discussion of the 'discomposure' it could cause some interviewees.

Synaestheory: Fleshing Out a Coalition of Senses

The Study of German War Experiences in Context Questions of how to represent violence and war have strongly influenced the German social, cultural, political, and historical imaginary. Particularly since the early 1990s critical discussions on German war experiences both at the front and at home and their depictions have been a dominant theme in the culture sections of German newspapers as well as in the academy. These discussions focus primarily on Germany during the Second World War with a special emphasis on the experience of German wartime suffering during the air war and during the flight and expulsion from the East (e.g. Assmann; Cohen-Pfister and WienroederSkinner; Cooke and Silberman; Schmitz; Schmitz and Seidel-Arpaci; Taberner and Berger; Vees-Gulani; Wilms and Rasch; cf. also Sus, reviewed by Peter Fritzsche in this issue). While these debates specific to the Second World War are necessary and important, this special issue hopes to expand this discourse beyond its restrictive temporal focus. Taken together, the contributions offer a clearer picture of the continuations, patterns, breaks, and places of German depictions of war and violence and their cultural memorialization from the eighteenth century to the present. It is thus not the aim of the contributions simply to recall the contents of such representations of German war experiences but instead to concentrate on the processes and concerns of war representations. In the included articles, the authors employ tools and concepts that have recently emerged in the interdisciplinary field of cultural war studies, involving numerous disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences. Seeking a wider scope than military history, it tackles the origins, nature, and consequences of war and conflict and of the violence that accompanies them in all its complex aspects, including the connection of war to its cultural representation and memorialization. Involvement in war studies reaches from literary studies to psychology, from classics to peace and conflict studies, and is omnipresent in all fields of cultural studies, including gender studies, visual culture, media studies, and aesthetics. Seeing war through such a wide variety of methodologies opens the door to new and systematic approaches to the general representations of war in culture over time.

Efforts to reconstruct the local history during the Japanese occupation, the era of World War 2 in Morotai be an interesting thing to be studied and researched. The existence of Morotai in the lips of the Pacific Ocean has strategic value for both sides, both Allied soldiers led by the United States and the Japanese army to serve as centers of the military. Various historical artifacts spread over land and sea to witness the heroic history of the events that have occurred on Earth Morotai. Reconstruct the history of Japanese period is not easy, as there was no written document in the form of archives as a primary source in historiography. Oral history method (oral history) is an alternative in the review for the period. Oral history is one of the historical sources, which can be used as the writing of history. Through in-depth interviews with actors history obtained the historical fact that can be a source of important information about the events that occurred. Sadly, many actors and witnesses of history who have died so that informants who are still alive are very limited in number, plus the age constraints of the elderly so it is not easy to get the desired information and various other obstacles complicate efforts to reconstruct the history at that time. Need the support of all elements of society to facilitate trace the history of World War 2 on the island of Morotai.

From Henry Mayhew's classic study of Victorian slums to Studs Terkel's presentations of ordinary people in modern America, oral history has been used to call attention to social conditions. By analyzing the nature and circumstances of the production of such histories of delinquency, James Bennett argues that oral history is a rhetorical device, consciously chosen as such, and is to be understood in terms of its persuasive powers and aims. Bennett shows how oral or life histories of juvenile delinquents have been crucial in communicating the human traits of offenders within their social context, to attract interest in resources for programs to prevent delinquency. Although life history helped to establish the discipline of sociology, Bennett suggests concepts for understanding oral histories generated in many fields.

history goes naturally with military history. After all, veterans have told their war stories since time immemorial. William Alexander Percy, who saw combat in World War I, explained why war etches memory of many veterans so deeply. It was the only heroic thing we all did together.... it, somehow, had meaning, and daily life hasn't. It was part of a common endeavor and daily life is isolated and lonely.1 Wars have understandably received most attention from military historians as human lives and fate of nations hang in balance. In an earlier essay in this series, Oral History and Story of America and World War II, Roger Horowitz deftly illustrated how oral history aided in our understanding of military, political, and social aspects of that era.2 Since 1940s, many historians have employed oral evidence in their works about recent conflicts and about social and institutional developments in peace as well as war. Over years, I have learned much from them and their work. In this essay, I reflect on how I used oral history in my scholarship on World War I and peacetime American army. I shall also offer a brief guide to some of rich oral history collections available to military historians. Although World War II marked beginning of acceptance of oral history by scholars, journalists and some historians had asked participants about their actions long before that. Almost two and half millennia ago, Athenian general Thucydides talked with other participants before he wrote his history of Peloponnesian War. In nineteenth century, Lyman C. Draper, famed collector of trans-Appalachian frontier manuscripts, interviewed veterans of various frontier wars and deposited his notes with other documents in State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Among many others over years were two American war correspondents in

Reviewed by: Islamic Modernities In Southeast Asia: Exploring Indonesian Popular and Visual Culture by Leonie Schmidt Jennifer Goodlander ISLAMIC MODERNITIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: EXPLORING INDONESIAN POPULAR AND VISUAL CULTURE. By Leonie Schmidt. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 218 pp. Hardcover, $131.00; Paperback, $41.95. "To be Muslim, is to be modern" is the constant refrain of Leonie Schmidt's wide-reaching work on Indonesia, Islam, and popular culture. Her book is one of several giving attention to Islam and culture in Indonesia. Despite being the world's most populous Muslim country Indonesia is often left out of studies on Islamic culture, which tend to focus on the Arab world. In contrast, Schmidt's field research was carried out in the city of Yogyakarta, a bustling university town that is also popular with tourists; in addition many of her case studies are national or international in scope. The book examines various kinds of media and spaces, including rock music, fashion blogs, self-help books, shopping malls, and art. Within these various foci, there emerges several cohesive arguments and Schmidt is adept at drawing useful comparisons among the chapters. The book is not specifically about performance or theatre—but offers numerous intersections with wider concerns of performance studies and the role of Islam in mediatized identities in Southeast Asia that complement the field of theatre. [End Page 531] The introduction offers a historical overview of how Islam functions in Indonesian society and the relationship of global Islam to modernity, and how after the New Order period (1966–1998) people actively sought means to express diverse identities after a period of tight censorship. Schmidt contends her research is especially important because contemporary Indonesia is "simultaneously modernizing and Islamizing" and "popular and visual culture present perfect tools to publically fantasize and experiment with Islamic modernities" (p. 3). Thus her focus is not singularly on the object of study, whether it be a shopping mall, fashion blog, or rock song, but also in how Indonesians are consuming and using visual and popular cultures to construct modern Muslim identities. She establishes that she does not consider all culture produced by Muslims in a Muslim culture to be "Islamic", rather only those that bernafaaskan Islam, or "breath Islam". Most of her case studies encompass a relationship to "Islamic Culture" in some way, even though not all are Islamic culture per say. In order to analyze popular culture and its role in society, Schmidt outlines specific overlapping cultural spheres for her work: (1) leisure sphere (shopping malls); (2) media sphere (music, books, film, social media); and (3) creative sphere (visual and performance art). This is an effective way of conceptualizing these cases because it offers opportunities for cross-chapter comparisons and development of themes that greatly enrich the book's overall argument. Chapter Two "Urban Islamic Spectacles: Transforming the Space of the Shopping Mall during Ramadan" introduces an important theme that carries through several chapters in the book—the relationships between consumerism and religious piety. This chapter focuses on shopping malls in order to analyze the relationship between time and space in constructing meaning through intentional displays of Islamic goods, references to religion in advertisement, and people's engagement of the malls during Ramadan. The analysis of how expressions of Ramadan have shifted from private practice to public spectacle aligns with a larger shift of religious expression in Indonesia, and Schmidt offers valuable insight in analyzing specific moments or interactions. The chapter attempts to consider three large luxury malls together with Mal Malioboro, which is essentially an indoor market primarily for visitors to the city, but this lack of specificity makes it difficult to understand the relationships she is trying to draw between her theoretical framework and her evidence. The sixth chapter on Islamic fashion blogs draws similar conclusions, but also suffers from a lack of clear focus on a manageable number of examples. The next three chapters deal with rock music, self-help books, and film respectively. In each Schmidt provides excellent general [End Page 532] cultural and historical background for understanding the genre and its relationship to Indonesian society before giving focused analysis on a limited number of case studies. These three chapters provide the most...

When I began teaching women's studies in 1974, there were no materials in what we now proudly identify as women's oral history-oral history that, guided by a feminist sensibility, leads us to an examination of women's lives, consciousness, values. Except for the work of the Bancroft Library, there were not even many available oral histories of women. Additionally, methodological articles and books never addressed the special nature of women's oral history. In those early days, I relied on several standard methodological sources: Willa Baum's booklet on local history, Norman Hoyle's article, and Lewis Dexter's book on specialized interviewing. Now, almost ten years later, there is a growing body of literature in/on women's oral history, including methodological articles and guides, published interviews, and documentary films. I draw on the full range of these materials, in different ways for different classes and different purposes. First, when I offer students the option of an oral history as a class project, in any number of classes, I insist that they read my own methodological article in the Special Issue of FRONTIERS (Women's History, 2, No. 2). This, combined with the various topical outlines published in that issue, provides them with a good basis. (In the one-unit Oral History Methods class which I teach, I rely heavily on Edward Ives, assigning my own article as a supplementary reading.) I also suggest to students that they review the entire FRONTIERS issue so that they are exposed to the various ways that oral history can be used. Their oral histories, which are the basis for an interpretive paper, have been consistently good. Second, because we lack extensive social history documents for the study of women's everyday lifeparticularly the lives of working-class women and women of color-oral history provides much of the reading for my course, Women's Lives (an interdisciplinary course on the lives of women in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present). It is especially valuable as a means of examining the lives of Latina, black, Native American, and Asian American women. Although short fragments of interviews are usually not too fruitful for an intensive examination of women's lives, I do find that sections of Las Mujeres and of the Generations issue of Southern Exposure are very useful. As short as the segments in Las Mujeres are, certain themes can be explored, including generational change. Likewise, though the oral history fragments in The Ways of My Grandmothers cannot provide the detailed exploration of consciousness that more complete life histories do, within the total context of the volume they lead to a fruitful exploration of the Native American woman. Though perhaps not technically oral history, selections in Coming Out Stories provide some moving as well as humorous insights into the lesbian experience.

Ideologies of imperialism, othering, and difference do not exist in a vacuum nor do they end after the formal construction and maintenance of empires. Instead, imperialism infiltrates domestic culture and the day-to-day lives of even those citizens most isolated from policy- and decision-makers. From the household to the church and chapel, scholars of the British Empire have analyzed imperial influence at home as one of the many sites where empire was re- imagined and rearticulated. Moreover, popular visual culture serves as an important vehicle for the cultivation and transmission of dominating ideologies. Analyzing visual culture properly is an ethical exercise because visual culture not only depicts but also guides and changes both popular culture and dominant ideologies. My dissertation focuses on the intersections of imperialism and animal imagery in London's visual and popular culture during the interwar era. Analyzing exotic animal imagery in propaganda posters produced by the Empire Marketing Board, poster advertisements for the London Underground, popular and political cartoons, and the Official Guides to the Regent's Park Zoo, I argue that the design and display of these visual objects was profoundly influenced by British imperialism and served to reinforce and normalize this ideology at home. In the process, I reveal some of the ways in which humans represent non-humans-and other humans as non-humans-and explore the disconnect between the imagined and experienced geographies of empire. Accordingly, I demonstrate the ethical considerations of a popularized and mass- produced imperialism in the metropole, the strategies and consequences of representing animals in a human way, or humans in an animal way, and the immediate and lasting effects of this taken for granted result of imperial ideologies infiltrating and transforming visual and material culture at home.

The overwhelming focus on textual or dharma studies in Buddhism, to the relative neglect of artistic production, has led to a bias in understanding the close and intricate relationships between Buddhist art (usually comprising sculptures, mural paintings, architectural facades and ornamental elements, illuminated paintings, cloth banners, and drawings in manuscripts), rituals, and the written word. The constant dialogue between material, visual, and ritual cultures should be approached in tandem. Visual culture is a significant part of Buddhism and must be treated as part of the same social, historical, and geographical contexts as texts and practices. Buddhist visual culture, including art media, graphic aids, and physical objects or monuments associated with Buddhist practices, does not merely serve to illustrate sacred texts, legends, and doctrines. In addition, the textual tradition does not always have to explain or justify the presence—or absence—of a material object such as a Buddha icon or a Buddhist painting. While visual culture studies have become increasingly important in various academic fields over the years, a critical and complete overview of the precise relationship between art, ritual, and text in the study of south and southeast Asian Buddhism has yet to be written.

Reviewed by: Empires of Vision: A Reader ed. by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy Carla Manfredi Empires of Vision: A Reader. Edited by martin jay and sumathi ramaswamy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 688 pp. $119.95 (cloth); $32.95 (paper). Empires of Vision contributes to our understanding of the visual cultures of European imperialism and to their afterlives in postcolonial milieus. Thoughtfully edited by cultural historians Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, the volume includes twenty-one reprinted essays and is divided into two sections: “The Imperial Optic” and “Postcolonial Looking.” The first section introduces five visual media within a trans-historical and global context that spans roughly five hundred years of imperialism. The second section focuses on the decades following decolonization and explores the different ways in which subaltern artists have responded to or “look[ed] back” (p. 3) at Europe. The selections offer a multitude of historical, regional, cultural, and theoretical perspectives, which will be of interest to an interdisciplinary readership. Although many of the volume’s selections will undoubtedly be familiar to seasoned scholars, they will provide graduate students with a solid grounding for future historical and theoretical research across the fields of imperialism, postcolonialism, visual and cultural studies, and art history. It is impossible to do justice to any book in a brief review let alone to extracts from twenty-one impressive pieces of scholarship. Thus, this review focuses on the editors’ contributions to Empires of Vision, which are bold reminders of what cross-disciplinary study can achieve: a recasting of conventional, written histories and a questioning of entrenched theoretical paradigms. In “The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empires,” Ramaswamy offers a sophisticated and lucid introduction to current critical approaches to colonialism and visual culture. The stakes of Empires of Vision are clearly defined: “The image is a site where new accounts of empire, the (post)colony, and Europe itself emerge and depart from—even challenge—the more familiar narrative line(s) of nonvisual histories” (p. 3). The volume, explains Ramaswamy, responds to and encourages a gradual academic reorientation. Despite the appearance of several recent visual culture anthologies, the study of art remains largely limited to art history; indeed, histories of colonialism and postcolonialism marginalize the integral role of visual culture in the production of colonial violence. Ramaswamy supports her claim with an anecdote about Edward Said, who confessed that “‘just to think about the visual arts generally sends me into a panic’” (p. 5). Panic becomes a productive metaphor for theorizing how images are often “disorderly” and “unpredictable” and sometimes “incoherent”; thus, Empires of [End Page 927] Vision offers alternative histories to those presented in official textual archives (pp. 5–6). If colonial and postcolonial studies have given short shrift to the visual arts, then visual culture studies also need to catch up. In conventional visual culture accounts, the presence of empire is still obscured, resulting in a European framework of visuality (p. 10). To illustrate this argument, Ramaswamy refers to a compelling 1996 “Visual Culture Questionnaire” published in the journal October: No one who responded to this questionnaire was a specialist in visual arts from regions other than Europe or the United States (pp. 10–11). Needless to say, the questionnaire highlights the importance of this collection, which will militate against parochialism (whether disciplinary or otherwise) and encourage interdisciplinary and interregional approaches to visuality and empire. In their introduction to part 1, “The Imperial Optic,” Ramaswamy and Jay trouble Eurocentric approaches to visual culture by underscoring the dynamic interactions between metropolitan technologies and indigenous traditions and practices. Thus, the “mutually constitutive relationship between empire and image-work” engendered new practices of seeing in and outside Europe (p. 25). Part 1 is divided into four sections, which deal with easel painting, mass-printed illustrations, cartography, and photography/film respectively. Anthropologist Deborah Poole’s influential notion of “visual economy” (1997) serves as an underlying concept for this part. The term “visual economy,” rather than “visual culture” is better suited to consider how images circulate within wide social, cultural, geographical, and imperial networks. In other words, individuals do not have to share a common (visual) culture in order to belong to the...

Reviewed by: Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body by Cassandra Jackson Jennifer McFarlane-Harris Cassandra Jackson. Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body. New York: Routledge, 2010. 138 pp. $125.00. If you had an uneasy feeling in 2003 when you first encountered the CD cover for 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album—the sneaking suspicion that you [End Page 480] should be making intricate connections between the rap artist’s oiled musculature, depicted as if through a bullet hole of shattered glass, and nineteenth-century images of whip-scarred slaves—then Cassandra Jackson’s Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body is for you. In the tradition of some of the most influential and often taught works by cultural critics like Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, Jackson asks and answers difficult questions about the politics of looking, the dangers of seeing (and not seeing), and the ways in which we can only understand contemporary visual culture depicting black male bodies through informed readings of nineteenth-century historical and social contexts. Her book brings out the best of interdisciplinary scholarship, drawing on visual culture, trauma studies, cultural studies, disability studies, narrative theory, and work on gender and black masculinity. Jackson begins with what is arguably the quintessential photographic image from the nineteenth century: The Scourged Back (1863). The image is of a black man, unclothed from the waist up, whose back appears to be almost completely covered with thick scars that the word keloid barely begins to describe. Yet Jackson notes that this image is not in keeping with other photography of the period depicting wounded bodies, such as Civil War medical photography. Unlike the clinical, brusque quality of medical photographs, Jackson deftly explains The Scourged Back as a carefully crafted image operating at the nexus of sentimentality and realism. In the same way that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin became an archetypal abolitionist text causing readers to weep for (and with) enslaved characters like Uncle Tom, who experienced horrible physical and mental atrocities, so did The Scourged Back become an iconic image that allowed white viewers to imagine, lament, and ultimately, Jackson reminds us, appropriate the pain experienced by the man in the photograph (12). Both works appealed to whites’ humanity by making slavery relatable, but Jackson is right to point out that there are issues seemingly inherent in the medium of photography that sentimental fiction does not present. Often assumed to be an accurate, objective “picture” of life, photography brings the subject’s past agony into the present of the viewer’s optical experience (15). Building from work by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Jackson uses the phrase “sentimental aesthetic” to explain the contradictory operations of The Scourged Back: even as encountering the black subject invites an empathetic, almost physical response, the white viewer is simultaneously reassured that s/he is neither enslaved nor brutalized like the subject (16). Accordingly, the very point of human connection is also the point of great social distance. This paradox is one of Jackson’s strongest insights; indeed, she argues that the sense of sympathetic identification in the midst of difference is heightened by the composition of The Scourged Back, suggesting that the visual codes of race invoked through the positioning of the slave in the image would not have been lost on the nineteenth-century viewer. Although his skin is dark, Jackson argues that the slave’s profile subtly reminds the viewer of an ideal—that is, white—human type, referencing the Apollo figure at the top of J. C. Nott and George R. Gliddon’s terrifying taxonomy, Types of Mankind (1854). In Jackson’s words, “the sitter’s resemblance to common standards of beauty invested with notions of high culture would have signified intelligence and nobility, while his mutilated back would have been equally indicative of his status as a slave” (20). Jackson concludes her first chapter with two major points that are foundational to the entire book: first, that reading the wounded body may be dangerous because we always run the risk of becoming participants in the original act(s) of wounding, both in our...

Reviewed by: Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War ed. by Lissa Paul, Rosemary Ross Johnston, Emma Short Michael Joseph (bio) Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War. Edited by Lissa Paul, Rosemary Ross Johnston, and Emma Short. New York: Routledge, 2016. Aptly, this impressive collection begins with a foreword by Michael Morpurgo, who notes that while the names of the soldiers are passing from memory, we should never forget the point of their sacrifice: “to create a world where their kind of suffering and dying is no longer necessary” (xiv). As the introduction reminds us, children are no longer noncombatants, but suicide bombers, soldiers. War is their milieu. For the West in 1914, this was not so. For a long time, children were “situated on the fringes of war culture.” In this book, “they are at the center” (6). The scholars gathered here are for the most part liminalizing the narrative, augmenting, complicating, even challenging our prevailing intellectual history: as Margaret Higonnet declares, all “narratives matter.” The nineteen essays divide into four sections, “Writing War,” “Propaganda and Experience,” “Education and Play,” and “Activism.” They originated as papers in an extended minuet: three conferences in three countries on three continents over three years, in Sydney (2011), Ontario (2012), and England (2013). The book draws to a close with an afterword by Peter Hunt, one of the conference shapers. At a hefty 347 + xviii pages, it’s a substantial thing. (There’s even writing on the back cover.) Readers get a lot of bang for the buck. [End Page 334] Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War properly begins with a magisterial example of literary criticism by Paul Stevens, who argues that Winston Churchill had an appetite for war that originated in his childhood reading of H. Rider Haggard, in whose novels a key association is forged between heroism and technology. Stevens emphasizes the hold upon Churchill of what Leo Marx called “the technological sublime,” the perception of power, even miracle, in the operations of the machine. Hopkins had his Windhover, Job his War Horse; Churchill had munitions. Two fine, engaging essays on Italian children’s literature by Lindsay Myers and Francesca Orestano follow, noting that such books were meant to inculcate patriotic feelings in child readers while depicting warfare as a necessary evil. Under the pressure of war, Italian children’s literature shifted from fantasy to realism, a balance that other writers reprise. Noting the near absence of the child in the documentation of war experience, Andrea McKenzie plumbs the pages of St. Nicholas magazine for clues to how girls aged ten through seventeen “perceived, imagined, and wrote the First World War” (61). Expounding on the formidable cultural schemata that reinforced gender roles, she nimbly argues that they persisted in asserting their individuality, struggling against the magazine’s generalizing tendencies. Delineated by a similar struggle are the young black readers in Katharine Capshaw’s adroit discussion of Our Boys and Girls, a journal that she has niftily rescued from oblivion. Here, she argues, is a “deeply ideological and critical voice . . . articulated clearly and directly to young [black] people” without deference to “inter-racial commonalities” following the war (87, 89). No less of a probing analysis of a children’s magazine is Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńowska’s discussion of Ungdomsvännen: Illustrerad Tidskrift för Hemmet (The Youth’s Friend: Illustrated Magazine for Home), which concerns “the experiences of the First World War as conveyed in ethnic writings of Swedish immigrant youth in the United States” (93). Stasiewicz-Bieńowska also mulls over identity construction, and her essay is an illuminating work of cultural criticism on an under-studied topic. Whereas McKenzie finds that the war influenced girls to critique dominating national narratives, according to Stasiewicz-Bieńowska it ushered Swedish-American youth toward greater “un-hyphenated American identity” (102). The focus on the reading and writing lives of young girls is reinforced and complicated by Andrew Donson’s essay on young German girls, who apparently had no problem imagining brutal military engagements or relishing the proposition that victory was predicated on military superiority (Siegfriede). Donson describes a (postliminal) turn toward greater...

Purpose This paper explores German artist Willy Jaeckel’s representations of the soldier as a victim of war within the context of German visual culture of the First World War. The paper draws attention to Jaeckel’s groundbreaking role within the German avant-garde, where he was among those earliest voices that actively challenged the morale-preserving, even jingoistic images of the war, which promoted a narrow dialogue of both the modern front experience and the human ability to endure it. Design/methodology/approach The analysis is based on careful examination of German wartime and postwar art and visual culture, to include art exhibited in galleries, artists’ periodicals and popular print media. Jaeckel’s wartime letters and contemporary critical reviews were consulted to provide insight to the artist’s intentions and the works’ reception respectively, while the position of Jaeckel’s images of soldiers among the war-related work of Germany’s revolutionary avant-garde is also considered. Findings Jaeckel’s work is shown to be among the very earliest and most unique of the entire war in its singular focus on the suffering of soldiers. Within the sociopolitical and artistic environment in Germany during the war years, it was courageous – and remains relevant – in its contestation of the popular image of the front experience, which worked to conceal the shattering impact of the war on soldiers’ bodies and minds. Originality/value In addition to drawing attention to the artist’s pivotal role in challenging the dominant language of wartime art, the paper addresses significant lacunae in Jaeckel scholarship, including analysis of the artist’s important body of works for the high-quality wartime arts periodicals Der Front (virtually absent from the literature), Kriegszeit and Krieg und Kunst, as well as critical responses to the exhibition of his confrontational portfolio of lithographs Memento 1914/15 and the major war picture Sturmangriff.