In October 2018, as we approached the centenary of the Armistice that marked the end of fighting in the First World War, the renowned film director Peter Jackson released They Shall Not Grow Old, a film that aimed to make the men who fought in the war “human beings, not … figures in a history book.” Techniques such as colorization, the slowing down of footage to replace the swift, jerky movements of old film with the more fluid movements of the human body, and the use of lip-readers to reinsert some of the conversations men were having as they were filmed, were applied to documentary film footage from the war itself. The results were almost universally praised, not only as an act of accessible public history but as a representation of that conflict that somehow makes it, and the experiences of the men who fought it (and the film does focus on men, specifically white British men on the Western Front) knowable and relatable.

This desire, to make the unknowable knowable, that which cannot be spoken communicable, is at the heart of this stimulating new collection of essays examining the literary and cultural representations of the conflict that were created during, and shortly after, the war years. Edited by Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin, who are both literary scholars and experts in the representation and communication of war experiences, the collection brings together eleven essays based on papers that were originally presented at the British Academy conference “First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity,” held in 2014.

In their introduction, Das and McLoughlin argue that representations of the war provide a means of examining modernity as both lived experience and representational form. The war's impact on modernity and debates as to whether it is best understood as a rupture, bringing into being a new world, or as continuity, as a particular event caused by and a part of the forces that we associate with modernity, will be familiar to many historians. Organized into three parts that focus separately on attempts to convey the unknowable, on representations of war away from the Western Front, and on the war as a site of cosmopolitan encounters and exchanges, this lively collection has much to offer to scholars of the First World War.

In the first section, “Unfathomable,” thought-provoking essays by Kate McLoughlin and Hope Wolf examine the writing of war veterans, exploring how those who experienced war attempted to make sense of it through language. Vincent Sherry's fine essay on mass death and the “economy of sacrifice” in the war draws out the ways in which sacrifice, still a central tenet of the cultural memory of the First World War, was mobilized during the conflict itself in an attempt to justify the deaths of so many in a cause that could be seen as opaque. Drawing on and critiquing Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the worth attached—or not—to humans killed or sacrificed, Sherry considers what happened to the term sacrifice, so rooted in Judeo-Christian religious imagery and language, when it was conscripted to the war effort. Utilizing a range of visual and literary texts, he tracks the changing meanings of the word during the war, concluding that (pace Agamben) the immeasurability of loss in the war meant that it was this conflict, predating the Holocaust, that saw the major shift in the meanings of sacrifice. Like the other essays here that examine literary texts, this one's tight focus is used successfully to open up much larger questions.

The experience of civilians in this modern total war is central to the collection's second section, “Scoping the War.” Sarah Cole's essay draws on Jay Winter's discussion of the “expressive quality of silence” to explore civilian writing on the war and its absence from what James Campbell termed the “combat gnosticism” of much war literature. Christine Froula addresses the affective and psychic climate for civilians who were learning to live under the threat of attacks from the air, while Mark Rawlinson explores the work of the British protofascists Wyndham Lewis and Henry Williamson to consider the thin line between representations of war as harrowing and hallowing, reminding the reader of the malleable quality of much war literature and its ability to be recruited by both antiwar protestors and pro-war politicians. Laura Marcus's essay on film takes the discussion outside of the literary focus of many other pieces in the collection to consider the ways that many films of the war showed a “thinned” relationship between the living and the dead, most notably perhaps in Abel Gance's 1919 masterpiece J'Accuse, in which soldiers about to return to the Front at Verdun played the dead rising up from their battlefield graves to accuse the living of failing them. This angry and powerful cry against the horrors of war was, as essays in this section show, one that could be made by civilians as well as by combatants.

In the final section, “Cosmopolitan Sympathies?,” attention turns to the war as a site of meetings and exchanges, reflecting recent shifts in the historiography of war, in part driven (in Britain at least) by community histories written during the centenary, towards remembering the war in trans-European and non-European terms. The war was, of course, global, a conflict that saw millions of people, including Belgian refugees, Indian sepoys, Chinese laborers, and Senegalese tirailleurs crossing national borders and sometimes moving to, and dying in, new continents. In parochial Ypres alone, remembered as the epicenter of the British experience of the Western Front, more than fifty different ethnic groups mixed during the war. Jahan Ramazani uses Isaac Rosenberg's famously cosmopolitan rat, traveling easily between English and German trenches to feast on the dead, to open a discussion of the nature of cosmopolitanism, considering the limits placed upon it by conflict and the work of poets to build connections and collectivities across the divided borders of wartime. Motherhood, of course, was one of the ways that the women of the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom, meeting in The Hague in 1915, laid claim to such similarities, and Margaret R. Higonnet's essay explores the ways that the German artist Käthe Kollwitz's beautiful series of woodcuts, Krieg, powerfully articulated motherhood and wartime loss as symbols of the transnational impact of war, uniting the bereaved across national borders. Clare Buck traces the representation of the war as a site of cosmopolitan encounters in the work of the nurses and authors Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden. Finally, in the collection's concluding essay, Santanu Das takes us outside of the Western experience of war to explore its representations in the work of Ottoman, Indian, and other non-Western subjects, arguing convincingly that the war provided one of the twentieth century's foundational moments for anticolonial thinkers, writers, and activists.

This collection, while rooted in the literary, draws upon the long and productive tradition of interdisciplinary studies of the First World War. It follows in the tradition of fruitful exchange between historical, literary, and cultural studies in the scholarship of the war and is a welcome addition to this literature.