The Great War set in motion all of the subsequent violence of the twentieth century. The war took millions of lives, led to the fall of four empires, established new nations, and negatively affected others. During and after the war, individuals and communities struggled to find expression for their wartime encounters and communal as well as individual mourning. Throughout this time of enormous upheaval, many artists redefined their role in society, among them writers, performers, painters, and composers. Some sought to renew or re-establish their place in the postwar climate, while others longed for an irretrievable past, and still others tried to break with the past entirely.

This volume offers a significant interdisciplinary contribution to the study of modern war, exploring the ways that artists contributed to wartime culture – both representing and shaping it – as well as the ways in which wartime culture influenced artistic expressions. Artists’ places within and against reconstruction efforts illuminate the struggles of the day. The essays included represent a transnational perspective and seek to examine how artists dealt with the experience of conflict and mourning and their role in (re-)establishing creative practices in the changing climate of the interwar years.

Sally Debra Charnow is Professor of Modern European, Postcolonial History, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Hofstra University. She brings together her interdisciplinary training in Performance Studies and History in her research and writing on issues related to cultural production, art and politics, and minority subcultures in modern France and beyond. She is the author of Theatre, Politics and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Staging Modernity (2005) and Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France (forthcoming). Her articles and reviews have appeared in Revising Dreyfus: Art and Law (2013), Radical History Review, American Historical Review, French History, Modern and Contemporary France, and H-France.