Exploring the Crimean War through literature, theatre, spectacle, and visual arts, this book reveals how and why a major war was forgotten.

The Crimean War (1854–56) is widely considered the first modern war with its tactical use of railways, telegraphs, and battleships, its long-range rifles, and its notorious trenches – precursors of the Great War. It is also the first media war: the first to know the impact of a correspondent on the field of battle and the first to be documented in photographs. No one, however, including the French themselves, seems to remember that France was there, fighting in Crimea, losing 95,000 soldiers and leading the Allied campaign to victory. It would seem that the Crimean War has no place in the canon of culturally retained historical events that define modern French identity. Looking at literature, art, theatre, material objects, and medical reports, The Crimean War and Cultural Memory considers how the Crimean War was and was not represented in French cultural history in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the book illuminates the forgotten traces that the Crimean War left on the French cultural landscape.

This book explores national attitudes to remembering colonialism in Britain and France. By comparing these two former colonial powers, the author tells two distinct stories about coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism, the role of silence and the breaking thereof. Examining memory through the stories of people who incited public conversation on colonialism: activists; politicians; journalists; and professional historians, this book argues that these actors mobilised the colonial past to make sense of national identity, race and belonging in the present. In focusing on memory as an ongoing, politicised public debate, the book examines the afterlife of colonial history as an element of political and social discourse that depends on actors’ goals and priorities. A thought-provoking and powerful read that explores the divisive legacies of colonialism through oral history, this book will appeal to those researching imperialism, collective memory and cultural identity.

The British have been involved in numerous wars since the Middle Ages. Many, if not all, of these wars have been re-constructed in historical accounts, in the media and in the arts, and have thus kept the nation's cultural memory of its wars alive. Wars have influenced the cultural construction and reconstruction not only of national identities in Britain; personal, communal, gender and ethnic identities have also been established, shaped, reinterpreted and questioned in times of war and through its representations. Coming from Literary, Film and Cultural Studies, History and Art History, the contributions in this multidisciplinary volume explore how different cultural communities in the British Isles have envisaged war and its significance for various aspects of identity-formation, from the Middle Ages through to the 20th century.

In historical studies, 'collective memory' is most often viewed as the product of nationalizing strategies carried out by political élites in the hope to create homogeneous nation-states. In contrast, this book asserts that collective memories develop out of a never-ending, triangular negotiation between local, national and transnational actors.

Rescuing the Crimean War from the shadows, Lara Kriegel demonstrates the centrality of a Victorian war to the making of modern Britain.