'Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years. By engaging with developments in Children’s Literature, War Studies, and Education, and mining newly available archival resources (including letters written by children), the contributors to this volume demonstrate how perceptions of childhood changed in the period. Children who had been constructed as Romantic innocents playing safely in secure gardens were transformed into socially responsible children actively committing themselves to the war effort. In order to foreground cross-cultural connections across what had been perceived as ‘enemy’ lines, perspectives on German, American, British, Australian, and Canadian children’s literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children.' (Publication summary)
Contents indexed selectively.
'This chapter explores some of the ways in which the literary arts of poetry and novels, especially those for children and young people, and the visual arts of paintings and posters, often depicting children, were used in Australia during the First World War to show and tell not only the idea of war to those at home, but the idea of home for those at war. It is part of wartime rhetoric to set personal identity and home place as core (as something worth fighting for), but simultaneously to indent that core with qualities and places beyond the personal and the personally experienced: thus not just my home, my
family, my community, but our family, our community, our nation. This concept of home becomes imbued with symbols that both represent and unite and that establish a semiotics of home that includes both abstractions – a deep inner sense of shared cause alongside like-minded companions, and the materiality of physical space. This physical space expands into the metaphysical, into not just images of home and place and landscape, but potent metonymous and synechdocal imageries of home and place and landscapes.'
Source: introduction.
