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[ecrea] World War 1 Media, Entertainments & Popular Culture
Sun Nov 16 14:24:39 GMT 2014
World War 1
Media, Entertainments & Popular Culture
Two Day Conference
Thursday 2nd and Friday 3rd July 2015
People’s History Museum, Manchester, UK
Abstract: Deadline: 19th January, 2015
Organised by: University of Chester, University of Salford, UCLAN,
Manchester Metropolitan University.
Email: Chris Hart
(c.hart /at/ chester.ac.uk)
URL: http://ch5983.wix.com/ww12015conference
(under
construction)
Address for correspondence:
Dr Chris Hart
Department of Media
Warrington Campus
Faculty of Media and Performing Arts
University of Chester, England
WA2 ODB
________________________________________________________________________
The Call (short version)
The scope : this conference aims to bring together scholars from a wide
range of disciplines to examine and discuss both contemporary and
subsequent accounts, interpretations and uses of the First World War in
terms of mass and popular media and entertainments.
We are inviting proposals for papers on any aspect of the Media,
Entertainments and Popular Culture during and after the First World
War. Possible themes include,
Photography, films, newsreels
WWI celebrities?
Contemporaneous press reportage?
Wartime censorship?
Oppositional/dissenting voices?
Music hall performers?
Wartime images?
The popular press and WWI?
Wartime and cultural memory ?
Popular music
Sports
Pubs and clubs ?
The war in popular fiction?
Cartoons, Posters
Post 1918 popular uses of World War I themes.
The Call (longer version)
Four universities and the People’s History Museum, Manchester, have come
together to stage this conference and related events.
This conference has two main themes. The first is popular mass
entertainments (e.g. singers, music, magazines, sport) that emerged as
the war progressed. The second is the ways in which the war furnished
the reference for subsequent popular mass consumed productions (e.g. The
Big Parade, 1925, War Horse, 2011).
This conference is not about the trivial nor does it seek to
trivialize. We expect there to be many events marking the start and key
landmark events of the First World War, as is right and proper.
Remembrance of the politics, battles, technologies and unimaginable
sufferings should never be forgotten.
Whether civilian or serviceman or servicewoman popular mass
entertainments had a part to play in their lives. This conference,
therefore, does not aim to examine artistic production during and
immediately after the war. Works by artists such as Gertler, Wadsworth,
Wyllie, Bone, Lewis and Munnings, and many others, may have been popular
amongst some sections of society and have become the stock knowledge for
scholarship but they did not attract a mass audience. Along with
contemporary sculpture, poetry and opera they remain the preserve of a
minority, and are relatively unknown to the masses. There are
exceptions such as McCrea’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ and possibly a few
poems by Owens and Sassoon.
This conference is about the relationship between popular and mass
entertainments during the war and the use of the war for subsequent mass
audience productions. It aims to examine the role, form and development
of entertainments created during and related to it post-1918. The music
hall, the singers, performers, the cartoons, romantic novels, and cinema
all had a place and role to contemporaries. By 1915 many of these may
have relayed the experience of war and some provided the means to
maintain morale and patriotism. Not all, however, supported the war.
After one year of war initial optimism was confronted with the
realization that this war was different to others. The number of
wounded and killed was shockingly high. English coastal towns were
bombarded by German battleships, whilst other cities were bombed from
German airships.
Given the reality of the war the kinds of questions we have include the
following. How did popular entertainments react to the war? What were
the dynamics, politics and reception of different positions? In what
ways did the form of mass entertainments change as the war progressed?
What role did technology have in disseminating entertainments? How did
commercial entertainment enterprises use the war to attract audiences?
What differences and conflicts emerged between regions, classes and genders?
In addition to those who lived during the war we also want to examine
and discuss how subsequent generations became audiences for
entertainments based about the war. Cinema films such as The Big Parade
(1925), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Farewell to Arms
(1932) have become stock sources for film studies. But how did the
messages and imagery they convey attract mass audiences? In what ways
are mass entertainments during the war portrayed in post 1918 films,
fiction and television? In what sense and why is the war experience
shown as sadness, regret and ruling class stupidity? How do current
generations understand the war through recent mass entertainments (e.g.
Downton Abbey, The War Horse)?
The complexity and dynamics of historical and contemporary
methodological issues relating to mass popular entertainments during the
war and since 1918 are challenging.
Abstract Deadline: 19th January, 2015
Please email a 300 word abstract (stating your name, email address and
institutional affiliation) to: (c.hart /at/ chester.ac.uk).
Outputs
A book of selected papers from the conference titled,
World War I: Media, Entertainments & Popular Culture. This will be a
companion volume to our book World War II and the Media (2014).
A dedicated edition of Media, War & Conflict (Sage Publications).
Organising Committee
Chris Hart (c.hart /at/ chester.ac.uk)
Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova (v.petkova /at/ chester.ac.uk)
Craig Horner (C.Horner /at/ mmu.ac.uk)
Carole O'Reilly (c.oreilly /at/ salford.ac.uk)
Jim Aulich (J.Aulich /at/ mmu.ac.uk)
Nick Mansfield (NMansfield1 /at/ uclan.ac.uk)
Gaynor Bagnall (g.bagnall /at/ salford.ac.uk)
Chris Lee (c.lee /at/ salford.ac.uk)
Address for correspondence
Dr Chris Hart
Department of Media
Warrington Campus
Faculty of Media and Performing Arts
University of Chester, England
WA2 ODB
Dr Christopher Hart
PhD (Linguistics) MA (Economics) BA (Hons) FHEA
Department of Media
Porters Lodge, Room WMP 119
Faculty of Arts and Media
University of Chester, Warrington Campus
Crab Lane, Warrington
Cheshire, WA2 ODB
Tel: 01925 534695
Blog: http://hartchester.wordpress.com/
Research Gate: Chris Hart Chester
Literature reviewing: http://ch5983.wix.com/literaturereviewing
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