This handbook explores a diverse range of artistic and cultural responses to modern conflict, from Mons in the First World War to Kabul in the twenty-first century. With over thirty chapters from an international range of contributors, ranging from the UK to the US and Australia, and working across history, art, literature, and media, it offers a significant interdisciplinary contribution to the study of modern war, and our artistic and cultural responses to it. The handbook is divided into three parts. The first part explores how communities and individuals responded to loss and grief by using art and culture to assimilate the experience as an act of survival and resilience. The second part explores how conflict exerts a powerful influence on the expression and formation of both individual, group, racial, cultural and national identities and the role played by art, literature, and education in this process. The third part moves beyond the actual experience of conflict and its connection with issues of identity to explore how individuals and society have made use of art and culture to commemorate the war. In this way, it offers a unique breadth of vision and perspective, to explore how conflicts have been both represented and remembered since the early twentieth century.

This handbook explores a diverse range of artistic and cultural responses to modern conflict, from Mons in the First World War to Kabul in the twenty-first century. With over thirty chapters from an international range of contributors, ranging from the UK to the US and Australia, and working across history, art, literature, and media, it offers a significant interdisciplinary contribution to the study of modern war, and our artistic and cultural responses to it. The handbook is divided into three parts. The first part explores how communities and individuals responded to loss and grief by using art and culture to assimilate the experience as an act of survival and resilience. The second part explores how conflict exerts a powerful influence on the expression and formation of both individual, group, racial, cultural and national identities and the role played by art, literature, and education in this process. The third part moves beyond the actual experience of conflict and its connection with issues of identity to explore how individuals and society have made use of art and culture to commemorate the war. In this way, it offers a unique breadth of vision and perspective, to explore how conflicts have been both represented and remembered since the early twentieth century.

Chapter 1: Introduction – Artistic and Cultural Responses to War; Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley and Janet McDonald.- Part One: Loss, Grief and Resilience.- Chapter 2: No Agency: Iraq and Afghanistan at War. The Perspective of Commissioned War Artists; Charles Green and Lyndell Brown.- Chapter 3: Megan Leavey and the Popular Visual Culture of the War-on-Terror; Paul Duncum.- Chapter 4: Tommy Talk: War Hospital Magazines and the Literature of Resilience and Healing; Alice Brumby.- Chapter 5: Wirral and The Great War;  Stephen Roberts.- Chapter 6: Touring the battlefields of the Somme with the Michelin and Somme Tourisme guidebooks; Caroline Winter.- Chapter 7: Pro patria mori – A Memorial in Music; Phillip Gearing.- Chapter 8: The Stamps-Baxter GI School of Music; Jeanette Fresne.- Chapter 9: Witnesses to Death – Soldiers on the Western Front; Natasha Silk.- Chapter 10: The Soldier as Artist – Memories of War; Michael Armstrong.- Chapter 11: Icons of Horror: Three enduring images from the Vietnam War; John M. Harris.- Part Two: Identity.- Chapter 12: The Weather in our Souls: Curating a national collection of Second World War art at the Imperial War Museum (IWM); Claire Brenard.- Chapter 13: Write propaganda, shut up or fight: Philip Gibbs and the Western Front; Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley and Abbey MacDonald.- Chapter 14: A War on Two Fronts: British Morale, Cinema and Total War 1914-1958; Gerard Oram.- Chapter 15: (Re)writing World War Two: United States, Russian and German national history textbooks in the immediate aftermath of 1989; Susan Santoli.- Chapter 16: They Wandered Far and Wide: The Scottish Soldier in the A.I.F.; Chapter 17: Scottish War Resisters and Conscientious Objectors 1914-1919; William Kenefick.- Chapter 18: Australian not by blood, but by character: Soldiers and Refugees in Australian Children’s Picturebooks;  Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley, Nathan Lowien and Kay Ayre.- Section 3: Commemoration.- Chapter 19: War began in nineteen sixty-three: Poetic responses to the 50th anniversary; Martin Malone.- Chapter 20: “Heroes and their Consequences:” 9/11, The War on Terror, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe; Inga Meier.- Chapter 21: ‘Re-membering’ the past; eye-witness and post-battle artistic accounts of the Falklands War; Paul Gough.- Chapter 22: The Imagined Memorial Gallery: Britain’s aspiration to commemorate the Great War through art; Alexandra Walton.- Chapter 23: Rectifying an Old Injustice: The Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C.; Christine Knauer.- Chapter 24: Lest They Forget: Exploring Commemoration and Rembrance through Games and Digital Technologies; Iain Donald.-  Chapter 25 : Combat Cinematography: Interpreting the cinematographic form of combat realism; Daniel Maddock.- Chapter 26: Conflict and Compromise: Australia’s Official War Artistsand the “War on Terror”; Kit Messham-Muir.- Chapter 27: Angels, Tanks and Minerva: Reading the memorials to the Great War in Welsh chapels;  Gethin Matthews.-  Chapter 28: ‘The nest kept warm’: Heaney and the Irish soldier-poets; Martin Malone.- Chapter 29: The Theatre of War: Rememoration and the Horse; Janet McDonald.-Chapter 30: Australian War Memorials: A nation re-imagined; Martin Kerby, Malcom Bywaters and Margaret Baguley.- Chapter 31: Conclusion; Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley and Janet McDonald.- Index .