The Silent Morning

A collection of essays will be published next month that I’m quite excited about (and not just because it includes a paper of mine)

The Silent Morning is edited by Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy. The publishers describe it like this:

This is the first book to study the cultural impact of the Armistice of 11 November 1918. It contains 14 new essays from scholars working in literature, music, art history and military history. 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 the silence of the Armistice 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.

Here’s the list of essays:

Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy, Introduction: ‘This Grave Day’
1. John Pegum, The parting of the ways: The Armistice, the Silence and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End
2. Klaus Hofmann, Alfred Döblin’s November 1918: The Alsatian prelude
3. George Simmers, ‘A strange mood’: British popular fiction and post-war uncertainties
4. Alison Hennegan, Fighting the peace: Two women’s accounts of the post-war years
5. Trudi Tate, King Baby: Infant care into the peace
6. Andrew Frayn, ‘What a victory it might have been’: C. E. Montague and the First World War
7. Jane Potter, The Bookman, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Armistice
8. Max Haberich, ‘Misunderstood … mainly because of my Jewishness’: Arthur Schnitzler after the First World War
9. Peter Tregear, Leaping over shadows: Ernst Krenek and post-war Vienna
10. Kate Kennedy, Silence recalled in sound: British classical music and the Armistice
11. Claudia Siebrecht, Sacrifice defeated: The Armistice and depictions of victimhood in German women’s art 1918–1924
12. Michael Walsh, ‘Remembering, we forget’: British art at the Armistice
13. Alexander Watson, Indecisive victory? : German and British soldiers at the Armistice
14. Adrian Barlow, Mixing memory and desire: British and German war memorials after 1918

That’s a classy congregation that I’m proud to be part of. I saw a pdf of the whole thing for proof-reading, and was really impressed by the essays. I’ll write more about some of them when the book is actually published.

My essay is about how three very different novelists reacted to the end of the war: Philip Gibbs, Warwick Deeping and ‘Sapper’ – all three disturbed by the effects of the War, but all three looking back on it as a time of cohesion.

The book’s price is horrible, I know, but maybe potential readers can pester their libraries to invest in a copy – it’s worth it. And if there’s enough interest in the book it may go into paperback.