The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals

While literary scholars and historians often draw on the press as a source of information, First World War periodicals have rarely been studied as cultural artefacts in their own right. However, as this volume shows, the press not only played a vital role in the conflict, but also underwent significant changes due to the war. This Companion brings together leading and emerging scholars from various fields to reassess the role and function of the periodical press during the so-called ‘Greater War’. It pays specific attention to the global aspects of the war, as well as to different types of periodicals that existed during the conflict, ranging from trench, hospital and camp journals to popular newspapers, children’s magazines and avant-garde journals in various national and cultural contexts.

Marysa Demoor is Professor Emerita at Ghent University. Demoor is the author of A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815-1918 Mudscapes and Artistic Entanglements (Palgrave, 2022). With Ingo Berensmeyer and Gert Buelens she has co-edited the Cambridge Handbook to Literary Authorship (Cambridge, 2019). With Laurel Brake, she edited The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2009) and the Dictionary of 19C Journalism (British Library & Academia Press, 2009). She is the editor of Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930 (Palgrave, 2004) and the author of Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, 1870–1920 (Ashgate, 2000).

Cedric Van Dijck is a postdoctoral fellow in English Literature at the University of Brussels (VUB). He is a co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals (2023) and The Intellectual Response to the First World War (2017). His research on modernism and war has appeared in PMLA, TSLL, Modernism/modernity, Times Literary Supplement and Modernist Cultures.

Birgit Van Puymbroeck is Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She is the author of Modernist Literature and European Identity (Routledge, 2020).