Total War: An Emotional History

War is often lived through and remembered as a time of heightened emotional intensity. This edited collection places the emotions of war centre stage. It explores specific emotional responses in particular wartime locations, maps national and transnational emotional cultures, and proposes new ways of deploying emotion as an analytical device. Whilst grief and fear are among the emotions most immediately associated with the rhetoric, experience and memory of war, this collection suggests that feelings such as love, shame, pride, jealousy, anger and resentment also merit sustained attention. This book draws attention to the status and uses of emotion as a category of historical, and contemporaneous, analysis. It goes beyond the cataloguing of discrete feelings, to think about the use of emotion as a tool for understanding the past. It considers the emotional agency of historical actors and the contexts, modes and time frames in which they communicated their feelings. Wartime provides a particularly dynamic context for thinking through the possibilities and limitations of the emotional approach. This collection provides a series of case studies that explicate the ways in which emotional registers respond to cataclysmic world events. These range from First World War Germany, interwar France and Second World War Britain, to the Greek Civil War and to the post-war world. Several chapters defy conventional chronology, tracing the lingering emotional legacy of war across different conflicts and to the present day: they show how past, present and possible futures intersect in the emotions of a moment. They also reveal complicated links between the intimate, the national and the international, between interiority and sociality, and between conflict and its aftermath.