Disasters and Heroes : On War, Memory and Representation

Images of war and its commemoration are an everyday presence in contemporary culture, from the embedded reporter in the field to the Last Post at the Menin Gate.  Disasters and Heroes: On War, Memory and Representation revisits campaigns from the plains of Troy to recent events in the Balkans, examining how wars are represented and remembered.  Angus Calder shows how the 'facts'of war are transformed into myths that condition later responses to war, and how the construction of memory begins with wartime events themselves.

 

Beginning with a section devoted to war memorials and the public remembrance of war, such as D-Day commemorations, the essays collected in Disasters and Heroes then look at the lived experience of war for 'ordinary' people, while the final section deals with literary representation of war, from The Iliad to T.E. Lawrence and on to Christa Wolf's Cassandra.  Disasters and Heroes is a thought-provoking collection dealing with issues of major significance which recent events have made painfully topical.

Angus Calder, formerly Reader in Cultural Studies at the Open University in Scotland, is a member of the advisory committee of the Centre for Second World War Studies at Edinburgh University. He has published numerous books, including The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (1969), Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (1981), The Myth of the Blitz (1991), and Revolving Culture: Notes from the Scottish Republic (1994).