29th Feb 2012 4:30pm-6:30pm
C122 Lecture Theatre, Checkland Building, Falmer
'What happened to the Corbetts: Imagining and Preparing for War in 1930’s Britain'
Dr Lucy Noakes
School of Humanities
Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton
Abstract
The historian Richard Overy has recently called the 1930s ‘the morbid age’ arguing that during this decade British culture became obsessed with death, destruction and even the end of the world. This paper takes up this theme to argue that the cultural memory of the First World War, together with emergent new technologies acted to shape interwar culture, focusing on the ways in which a ‘coming war’ was imagined in British culture [both lived and textual] and the impact of such imaginings on preparation for this war.
Bio
Lucy Noakes is a social and cultural historian in the Faculty of Arts. She works on the experience and memory of warfare in twentieth century Britain and publications include the monographs War and the British (1998) and Women and the British Army (2006). She is currently working on a history of death, grief and bereavement in Second World War Britain for Manchester University Press.
