New Directions in War and Culture Studies

This edited volume explores the new directions emerging in the field of war and culture through six essays that examine conflicts and their cultural legacy from the First World War to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

The first two essays focus on the French experience of the World Wars through, first, a study of trench poetry and then the sexual experiences of POWs in Germany. The next two essays focus on gendered and especially women’s experiences of conflict through, first, a study of women’s war labour in the British army and then analysis of women photojournalists’ role in promoting the adoption of Vietnamese babies in the USA. This volume concludes with two essays focusing on twenty-first century conflict. The first explores representations of veterancy in contemporary Romanian fiction, and the second, the phenomenon of fanvids in relation to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

Originally published as a special issue of the Journal for War & Culture Studies, the book indicates new directions of travel for this sub-discipline and reflects the Journal’s commitment over the past two decades to bring the Arts and Humanities and the Social Sciences into dialogue with each other.

Martin Hurcombe is Professor of French Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. He is a specialist in early twentieth-century French culture, history, and politics and is the author of Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great War (2004) and France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War Next Door, 1936–45 (2011). He is also co-author with Martyn Cornick and Angela Kershaw of French Political Travel Writing in the Inter-War Years: Radical Departures (2017). His current work explores the history of the French sports press and publication industry through its relationship to road cycling.