Debra Rae Cohen, associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina, is the author of Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women's Great War Fiction (2002) and the coeditor of Broadcasting Modernism (2009). She coedits the journal Modernism/modernity. Douglas Higbee, associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Aiken, is the editor of Military Culture and Education (2010), the coeditor of Hunting from the Ivory Tower: Essays by Academics Who Hunt, the author of articles on twentieth-century soldier poetry and the British veterans' movement, and the coauthor of In Their Own Words: Augusta and Aiken Veterans Remember World War II.
The First World War was a conflict of unprecedented proportions that saw staggering loss of life. The catalyst for huge political and social changes, the war was in part shaped through propaganda, film, photography, poetry, memoir, and music. These artistic realms, in turn, influenced gender roles, the fate of empires, extreme political movements, and new aesthetic formations. The volume's scope reflects the vibrancy of today's instructors as they contend with the many issues critical for teaching the First World War in a variety of classroom settings, including: Critical paradigms used in thinking about the war, such as its relation to modernism The global reach of the war's representations, including the Middle East and South Asia Cultural motifs connected to the war, from psychiatry, pacifism, and consumer culture to the 1918 influenza pandemic.