A01=Joel Morley
Author_Joel Morley
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTD
Category=NHW
Category=NHWR5
Category=NHWR7
conscription
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
First World War
Great War literature
masculinity
Mass Observation
memory
military enlistment
oral history
Second World War
veterans
Product details
- ISBN 9781526157232
- Weight: 512g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 29 Jul 2025
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book connects the First and Second World Wars. It uses oral histories and Mass Observation material to explore men’s attitudes to Second World War enlistment and the relationship they perceived between military service and masculinity, and how these were influenced by understandings of the First World War. Locating the cultural legacy of First World War in the subjectivities of men who participated in the Second World War demonstrates the breadth of sources that informed men’s understandings of the First World War in interwar Britain. Its cultural legacy was omnipresent and diverse, and informed young men’s attitudes and service preferences, but it reinforced Edwardian conceptions of wartime masculinity as often as it undermined them. Two decades after the First World War ended, they remained resilient in the subjective understandings of men who grew up in the Great War’s shadow.
Joel Morley is an oral historian specialising in the cultural and social history of war and gender in twentieth-century Britain
