[ecrea] Media, War and Conflict Journal: Centenary Special Issue now available

It is one hundred years since the outbreak of the First World War (WWI). 
Consequently, this year has been marked by considerable investment in 
its commemoration. Yet the significance of the centenary lies not just 
in the opportunity to remember the war, but in the opportunity to 
explore and investigate the impact of its legacy on contemporary social, 
cultural and political life. As a contribution to this, Media, War & 
Conflict has dedicated this issue to the theme of WWI and its 
memorialization. The articles deal with a range of media – press, 
poetry, film and advertising – that draw on international, historical 
and contemporary perspectives. Combined they offer an insight into how 
memory of WWI shapes and is shaped by current mediations and 
re-mediations of the war.

See: http://mwc.sagepub.com/content/current

Articles:

Nick Webber and Paul Long
The last post: British press representations of veterans of the Great War

Harry Patch (1898–2009) was the last surviving soldier to have fought in 
the trenches of the Western Front, entering the media spotlight in 1998 
when he was approached to contribute to the BBC documentary Veterans. 
Media coverage of Patch and the cultivation of his totemic status were 
particularly prodigious in anticipating and marking his death, producing 
a range of reflections on its historical, social and cultural 
significance. Focusing on the British popular press, this article 
examines media coverage of the last decade of Patch’s life. It considers 
the way in which the Great War is memorialised in the space of public 
history of the media in terms of the personalisation and 
sentimentalisation of Patch, exploring how he serves as a synecdoche for 
the millions of others who fought, how he embodies ideas of generational 
and social change, and how the iconography of the Great War’s 
contemporaneous representation works in the space of its memorialisation.


Ross Wilson
Sad shires and no man’s land: First World War frames of reference in the 
British media representation of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

The focus of this article is the manner in which media representations 
in Britain of the 21st century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan drew 
upon the terms, allusions and imagery of the First World War. The 
application of these visual and textual frames of reference has been 
used to demonstrate the failings of government, the need for national 
support or the validation of anti-war perspectives. Through the use of a 
critical discourse analysis, this assessment will highlight how the war 
of 1914–1918 is used within contemporary Britain as a vehicle for 
political and social commentary upon the actions of authority. Despite 
being fought at the outset of the last century, the newspaper coverage 
of the British Army’s operation in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrates how 
the First World War still goes on within sections of British society.


Leanne Green
Advertising war: Picturing Belgium in First World War publicity

With the German invasion of Belgium on 4 August 1914, Britain was given 
a noble cause. Not only had the Germans apparently violated an 
international treaty in their invasion of neutral land, but according to 
press reports they were showing no remorse as they committed alleged 
acts of atrocity upon the innocent nation. As the press justified the 
war in terms of the sanctity of the law and the safety of civilians, 
Britain’s involvement became difficult to dispute. The invasion of 
Belgium merged parliamentary and press support for the war and provided 
the two with a powerful tool that they fully intended to exploit. This 
article argues that because of Britain’s vast machinery for the 
production and distribution of propaganda, visual representations of the 
German invasion of Belgium had ramifications for the way that the 
meaning of the war was addressed to the British public. The plight of 
Belgium featured prominently in the British press during the first few 
months of war.
Visual propaganda from both public and private concerns used rhetorical 
frameworks of national loyalty, gender and the family to manipulate 
public opinion. War advertising was instrumental in providing a link 
between the state and the masses. Also used by charities and other 
interest groups, it was perceived as a crucial and effective link to the 
public. Drawing from a collection of war advertising held at the 
Imperial War Museum, the author traces the way that both public and 
private concerns targeted the wave of ‘Belgianitis’ that was spreading 
across Britain at the time of their production, notably to justify and 
garner support for the war, to raise funds and promote recruitment.
Full Text (PDF)

Anderson D Araujo
Jessie Pope, Wilfred Owen, and the politics of pro patria mori in World 
War I poetry
This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two 
key World War I English poets: Jessie Pope, a then immensely popular 
Home Front poet–journalist and staunch supporter of the Allied war 
effort; and Wilfred Owen, a soldier–poet whose verse would evolve from 
its Romantic-Georgian and pastoral roots to yield some of the most 
scathing indictments of the war. In focus are the poets’ chief 
compositions, Pope’s jingoist ballad, ‘The Lads of the Maple Leaf’ 
(1915), and the several drafts of Owen’s antiwar trench lyric, ‘Dulce Et 
Decorum Est’ (1917–1920). The author argues that although the poems are 
diametrically opposed – politically and ideologically – they nonetheless 
share a set of cultural, historical, and literary markers which converge 
on Horace’s ancient slogan in praise of an honourable death in battle, 
dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Significantly, the article locates 
for the first time Pope’s forgotten ballad as the m
ost likely catalyst for Owen’s famous gas poem. With Pope’s poetry as a 
nexus, the discussion takes Owen’s original mock-dedication of ‘Dulce Et 
Decorum Est’ to her and other pro-war poets as a point of departure for 
examining Pope’s investment in the tropes and memes of Britain’s 
imperial project, especially in relation to Canada. The aim is to 
explore Pope’s mythopoeic glorification of Canadian troops in light of 
the non-partisan hellish vision of Owen’s warrior poet. Given that 
Pope’s poem establishes at the outset Canadians’ submissive loyalty to 
the British Empire, the article enlists Canadian combatant and 
non-combatant poetry to illustrate the colonial–imperial traffic of 
ideas informing the belligerent poetic–aesthetic turn the war provoked 
in Canada and Britain. The argument thus sheds new light on one of the 
best-known war poems, whilst bringing Pope’s long-neglected agitprop 
ballad out of the shadows.


Marie-France Courriol
Looking back on the myth of the Great War: Anti-rhetoric, war culture 
and film in Fascist Italy

The First World War (WWI) constituted a fundamental event for the 
stabilisation of Fascism both as an ideology and as a regime. However, 
1930s Italian cinema resisted the Fascist vision of the conflict to a 
certain extent. In this article, the author argues that Italian war 
films of the period avoided in part the Fascist myth of the Great War, 
while being fully inserted in the official film circuits of the time. 
Examining the films’ commercial imperatives and production history, the 
author demonstrates that the event constituted a paradoxical form of 
taboo in fiction cinema. Contrary to other film forms (newsreels and 
documentary), the industrial nature of fiction cinema and its link with 
international film production allowed for a relative space of freedom. 
Based on film analysis as well as archival material and textual sources, 
the article shows how this film production conflicts with the Fascist 
celebration of WWI. Concerned with understanding their initial reception co
ntext, it focuses in particular on the problematic nature of these films 
as put forward by certain observers at the time. Characterised by a lack 
of triumphalism and rhetoric, the cinematic representation of WWI was 
instead associated with extrinsic values that ran parallel to or even 
conflicted with the selective memory of the conflict imposed by Fascism. 
Despite this, these films contributed to the war culture of the regime, 
consequently testifying to the weakness of Fascist militant cinema, 
perceptible at the very heart of the image of WWI it created.




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