In the opening remarks to their edited volume Teaching Representations of the First World War, Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee succinctly locate this collection of essays within a complex narrative that attempts to account for “the wider story—the global story” of the Great War (4). “Why is it that we can never quite escape the First World War?” they ask (1). It is a question often raised, and the answer, judging from the sum of the essays presented, is that the war is both global and interdisciplinary. The thirty-five essays in this collection, taking a wide variety of angles and perspectives, work together to recover the diversity of the war experience, to stress the multiplicity of total war rather than its universality, and to give readers a variety of “methodological maps” by which they can begin to negotiate and teach the “expansions and remappings” of the field (4).

Teaching Representations of the First World War is published as part of the Modern Language Association's Options for Teaching Series—a collection of broad-based volumes which, according to MLA, seeks to be a sourcebook of material, information, and ideas for specialists and nonspecialists, inexperienced and experienced teachers, graduate students, and senior professors. While I came to this volume believing that it would be an assortment of strictly pedagogical projects, I was surprised by the amount of academic research and vigorous critical conversation. The editors provide little information about how the volume is to be used, though I can imagine a course being based around one of the collection's five rubrics. Or around each individual chapter. Or a professor could simply pick out various class projects from the volume as a whole.

Regardless of the approach, Cohen and Higbee insist that, starting with the survey course and working up to the seminar, scholars must encourage students to complicate the dominate narratives of the war. The editors are mindful to be as expansive as possible. Santanu Das writes in his chapter on South Asian literature that “even today, in classrooms around the world, First World War literature speaks with a British accent” (126). The editors address this concern by capturing the cultural range of a global war. The volume includes essays by Richard Smith, Wolfgang Natter, Nancy Sloan Goldberg, Glenda Abramson, Santanu Das, and Stephen Tabachnick, who represent African, German, French, Eastern European, Asian, and Middle Eastern perspectives respectively. These voices account for senior academics and junior scholars and demonstrate the editors’ hope that the collection will not replace “one grand narrative with another” (13).

Cohen and Higbee are conscious of the structure and organization of this essay collection—they admit that the volume is rather like the war itself: “hefty,” “diverse,” and with a broad range of subjects—and the essays appear in conversation with each other (13). The essays, as noted above, are divided into five rubrics: (1) “Critical Paradigms,” a section organized around theoretical concerns such as those discussed in “What is War?” (Anne E. Fernald) and “What is the Relation of the First World War to Modernism?” (Vincent Sherry) (2); “Global Narratives,” which examines not only the multinational war experience but also probes the “gendered particularities” of the war (7); (3) “Cultural Motifs,” which surveys what the editors call the “embodied modes of experience” (7)—sexuality, physicality, spatiality, and materiality; (4) “Genres,” which provides a robust series of essays on children's literature, film, drama, short fiction, contemporary fiction, graphic novels, popular music, and music videos; and finally (5) “Places and Pedagogies,” which concludes the volume by reflecting upon and returning to the classroom—teaching with digital tools and archives, encouraging community-based learning, and introducing military themes in a military setting. The five rubrics bring together varying philosophies, methodologies, and critical orientations, with a variety of schools, students, and courses considered. Each rubric has its strengths. The third in particular stands out for its ability to account for representations beyond the battlefield: Pearl James and Laura Doan offer essays on gender and sexuality; Eve Sorum, Celia Marshik, and Deborah Buffton examine material aspects of war through maps, advertisements, and monuments; Wyatt Bonikowski considers psychological experiences; while Jane Elizabeth Fisher looks at the physical health crisis brought about by the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Several contributors offer practical insight into their own teaching experience and classroom dynamic. Glenda Abramson, writing on the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe, lays out a very clear syllabus and reading list. Stephen Tabachnick, writing on autobiography from the Middle East, organizes his essay around individual class sessions. Marguerite Helmers, writing on art, offers sample assignments. Carol Acton, writing on linguistics, proposes a sophisticated graduate seminar on the language of war.

Despite the volume's breadth, its desire for inclusivity, and its insistence that we need to rethink and reevaluate the baseline and biases from which we teach the Great War, many topics and representations are still missing—for instance, the element of mechanized warfare; the voices of aviators and mariners, which tend to be ghettoized in favor of the soldier and civilian experience; the war's turn both toward and against religion; the photographs that captured the war; the animals that helped win the war; and the legacy of disability after the war. No collection can be comprehensive. Still, Teaching Representations of the First World War begins the conversation and proves itself as a much-needed guide to helping those in the classroom develop courses that allow the many stories of the Great War to emerge.