Limbs at War: Amputation, Mutilation and Paralysis – Wilfred Owen, Blaise Cendrars and D.H. Lawrence.
“We are among the ruins” (LCL 5), the narrator of Lady Chatterley’s Lover asserts at the beginning of the novel. If this postwar outlook obviously refers to the economic, political, social and moral situation of Europe, the ruins were also significantly individual: shell-shock (as Rebecca West depicts in The Return of the Soldier), disfigurement (notably represented in Henry Tonks’s paintings) and, what will be analyzed here, dismemberment, were particularly striking and new. The new war mach...
The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain
Summary During the First World War, the horror of facial mutilation was evoked in journalism, poems, memoirs and fiction; but in Britain it was almost never represented visually outside the professional contexts of clinical medicine and medical history. This article asks why, and offers an account of British visual culture in which visual anxiety and aversion are of central importance. By comparing the rhetoric of disfigurement to the parallel treatment of amputees, an asymmetrical picture emerges in which the ‘worst loss of all’—the loss of one's face—is perceived as a loss of humanity. The only hope was surgery or, if that failed, prosthetic repair: innovations that were often wildly exaggerated in the popular press. Francis Derwent Wood was one of several sculptors whose technical skill and artistic ‘wizardry’ played a part in the improvised reconstruction of identity and humanity.
The Economics of World War I
This unique volume offers a definitive new history of European economies at war from 1914 to 1918. It studies how European economies mobilised for war, how existing economic institutions stood up under the strain, how economic development influenced outcomes and how wartime experience influenced post-war economic growth. Leading international experts provide the first systematic comparison of economies at war between 1914 and 1918 based on the best available data for Britain, Germany, France, Russia, the USA, Italy, Turkey, Austria-Hungary and the Netherlands. The editors' overview draws some stark lessons about the role of economic development, the importance of markets and the damage done by nationalism and protectionism. A companion volume to the acclaimed The Economics of World War II, this is a major contribution to our understanding of total war.