Landscapes of the Western Front

Considering that it was widely observed to be a war of matériel by contemporaries, the material culture of the First World War has taken quite a while to become prominent in the academic historiography of the Great War. So, in principle, Ross Wilson’s book should be a welcome addition to the literature, and in many ways it is. It is a book packed full of interesting information, and, as if ‘materiality’ alone were not enough, it also promises an ethnographic study of the British on the Western Front and a consideration of contemporary responses and representations. All of this in 219 pages! At times, however, this proves to be a very frustrating book which frequently reads too much like a doctoral thesis rather than a monograph. It also suffers from an occasional problem of interdisciplinary research in that the requirement to pay academic dues to key literature in a series of different subjects leads to rapid overviews which can become little more than mere lists. At the same time, the ‘ethnographic’ approach sometimes leads to large chunks of primary source quotation being piled up on top of each other. While there is a methodological justification for this, it can on occasion feel rather pedestrian

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Ethnography · Front (military · Geography · Historiography · Key (lock · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Media studies · Sociology · Archaeological Research and Protection · Computer Science · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society