The silent morning

This is the first book to study the cultural impact of the Armistice of 11 November 1918. It contains fourteen new essays from scholars working in literature, music, art history and military history. The book looks comparatively at British, German and Austrian works, covering authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Alfred Döblin, Ford Madox Ford, Philip Gibbs, C. E. Montague, Arthur Schnitzler, Helen Zenna Smith, and Virginia Woolf; composers such as Arthur Bliss and Ernst Krenek; artists Käthe Kollwitz, Käte Lassen, Wyndham Lewis, Lotte Prechner and John Singer Sargent. The chapters discuss the ways in which the war was memorialised in military cemeteries and art exhibitions, and how journals such as the Times Literary Supplement and the Bookman engaged with the Armistice and its aftermath. Together the essays offer new ways of thinking about the hopes and disappointments which accompanied the end of the First World War.The Armistice brought hopes for a better future, as well as sadness, disappointment and rage. Many people in all the combatant nations asked hard questions about the purpose of the war. These questions are explored in complex and nuanced ways in the literature, music and art of the period. This book revisits that moment of silence and asks how its effect was to echo into the following decades. The essays are genuinely interdisciplinary and are written in a clear, accessible style. The book is aimed at students and academics working on the First World War, as well as students of early twentieth-century literature, music and art history. It will also appeal to general readers interested in the war.Contributors include distinguished First World War scholars Jane Potter, Claudia Siebrecht, George Simmers and Alexander Watson.