Place: The University of Newcastle, Australia
Time: 22-24 November 2010
From the early modern period through to the present day, both combatants and non-combatants who lived through war have written about their experiences in autobiographical works. Sometimes published, but often not, such memoirs entail not only authors recalling their wartime lives but recasting, re-imagining and reprocessing their experiences.
The popularity of war memoirs in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in particular raises questions about why, when and the manner in which conflicts are recalled and remembered, how these texts contribute to or conflict with collective memories, and how they can be read and interpreted by the reading public and scholars alike. The highly specific nature of war memoirs means that comparative work is rare. The aim of this symposium is to compare different aspects and or approaches to war memoirs and, Continue reading