Museums, History and the Intimate Experience of the Great War

Love and Sorrow

Joy Damousi, Deborah Tout-Smith, Bart Ziino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000201345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The Great War of 1914-1918 was fought on the battlefield, on the sea and in the air, and in the heart. Museums Victoria's exhibition World War I: Love and Sorrow exposed not just the nature of that war, but its depth and duration in personal and familial lives. Hailed by eminent scholar Jay Winter as "one of the best which the centenary of the Great War has occasioned", the exhibition delved into the war's continuing emotional claims on descendants and on those who encounter the war through museums today. Contributors to this volume, drawn largely from the exhibition's curators and advisory panel, grapple with the complexities of recovering and presenting difficult histories of the war. In eleven essays the book presents a new, more sensitive and nuanced narrative of the Great War, in which families and individuals take centre stage. Together they uncover private reckonings with the costs of that experience, not only in the years immediately after the war, but in the century since.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: war, emotion and the museum
• Part I Emotions in conflict: on the battlefield and at home
• Part II Bearing the wounds of war
• Part III Emotions in histories of World War I
• Part IV World War I in the museum: Love and Sorrow at Museums Victoria
• Index