This module explores Britain’s role in the First World War, and examines the impact the war had on British society and culture. It takes a twin track approach, one exploring the military history of the war, the other examining this history through the study of a selected group of artists whose work both embodied the experience of war, and shaped British views of the war. It examines how these artists were involved in the war, how they viewed its progress, and how they responded to it in their work. The lectures and seminars focus on a group of selected authors, poets, artists, composers and the work they produced either during the war, or in the years after 1918, and have in many cases taken on an iconic role in twentieth-century Britain. The artists we focus on are not all from one school or style, but have been chosen to represent the traditional and the modern, and something of a cross section of British society in 1914; for example the poets Rupert Brooke and Hedd Wyn; the authors Vera Brittain, Siegfried Sassoon, and T. E. Lawrence; the painters Christopher Nevinson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer; and the composers Edward Elgar and Hubert Parry. In looking at the impact of the First World War on British society and culture, the module blends the military and social history of the period to examine how the British tried to come to terms with the war, how its progress was viewed, and how society responded to the war.

• Display a thorough knowledge of Britain’s military involvement in the First World War.
• Demonstrate an understanding of differing interpretations of the political, social, and cultural history of Britain during the First World War and the immediate postwar period.
• Display an ability to analyse selected cultural texts, including visual images, pieces of music, prose and poetry, and to relate these to their historical and political context.
• Analyse how different art forms were used to embody the experience of war, and to shape wider public perceptions of this experience.

• Intellectual Skills:

• Show an ability to discuss in an informed and critical manner the history of the British involvement in the First World War.
• Summarise the relative merits and demerits of alternative views and interpretations of British strategy and tactics in the First World War.
• Construct, sustain and develop arguments about the relationship between selected artists, their work, and their experience of war through an appropriate application of sources and terminology.
• To present accurately, succinctly and lucidly, and in written or oral form their arguments in accordance with appropriate scholarly conventions.

• Discipline Specific (including practical) Skills:

• Express their ideas and assessments of the history of the British involvement in the First World War.
• Discuss in an critical and informed manner the collective British experience of the First World War;
• Identify strengths, weaknesses, problems, and or peculiarities of alternative historical or/ and historiographical interpretations
• Apply a critical approach to the nature of primary sources in the assessment of historical interpretations and methodologies
• Use and evaluate cultural texts and demonstrate an appreciation of how historians have approached them

• Transferable Skills:

  ·To communicate ideas and arguments effectively, whether in speech or in writing in an accurate, lucid and succinct manner;

  ·To formulate and justify their own arguments and conclusions about a range of issues;

  To consider the arguments’ of peers in seminars and workshops and be prepared to re-evaluate one’s own position as a result of such discussions

How the module will be delivered

The course will be taught and students will learn through

• A series of formal lectures will introduce students to the main factual and conceptual issues to be discussed and analysed during the module
• Seminars  in which key texts are analysed will enable students to further develop analytic skills

Skills that will be practised and developed

• communicate ideas and arguments effectively, whether in class discussion or in written form, in an accurate, succinct and lucid manner.
• formulate and justify arguments and conclusions about a range of issues, and present appropriate supporting evidence
• an ability to modify as well as to defend their own position.
• an  ability to think critically and challenge assumptions
• an ability to use a range of information technology resources to assist with information retrieval and assignment presentation.
• time management skills and an ability to independently organise their own study methods and workload.

work effectively with others as part of a team or group in seminar or tutorial discussions.

Assessed coursework - to be agreed with module tutor

Syllabus content

1. Britain’s entry into the First World War

2. An introduction to the selected artists

3. The opening campaigns on the Western Front, August-November 1914

4. Trench warfare and the failed offensives of 1915

5. ‘Easterners’ and ‘westerners’: Gallipoli and the ‘side shows’

6. The war at sea, 1914-1918

7. Slaughter on the Somme, 1916

8. Passchendaele, and the growing tension between civilian and military direction of the war in 1917.

9. The ‘Hundred Days’ and the Armistice

10. Memory, autobiography, and memorials to the dea

Indicative Reading and Resource List:

Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Bantam, 1989)Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1975)Samuel Hynes, A war imagined: the First World War and English culture (Bodley Head, 1990)

Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (Macmillan, 1991)

A. J. P. Taylor, The First World War: an illustrated history (Hamish Hamilton, 1963)Jon Silkin, The Penguin Book of First World War poetry (Penguin, 1996)

Richard Cork, A bitter truth: avant-garde art and the Great War (Yale University Press, 1994)

Jane Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914-1918 (Clarendon Press, 2005)

Gary Sheffield and John Bourne (eds), Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters 1914-1918 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005)