The work of modernist poet and visual artist David Jones provides a retrospective vantage of the central claims of Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Jones saw the nineteenth century as a moment of breakage with the past. This rupture, according to Jones, threatens the work of the artist by depleting the sacramental meaning of reality – that is, the ability of concrete things to signify unseen spiritual depths. In both a dramatic biographical encounter with the Mass during his time on the front lines of World War I and in his subsequent art and poetry, Jones turns to liturgical forms to confront the breakage that began in the nineteenth century. Viewed from Jones’s perspective, the Romantic and Victorian interest in liturgy takes on new significance for the overarching genealogy of modernity and secularization. These liturgical fascinations intervene in – and resist – the long story of modernity’s separation of the material and spiritual, the natural and supernatural.

This chapter examines the rich and complicated relationship between Pirandello and Germany, beginning with his formation in Bonn and with German intellectual sources that were important for his worldview. It then examines the important role of the German stage and German director Max Reinhardt in influencing his mature theatre. At the same time, Pirandello’s own views of Germany also shifted over time, from his cultural affiliation with German thinkers to criticism of Austria and Germany in the period of the Great War. Spanning from inspiration to reception, Germany held an important if shifting and ambiguous place in Pirandello’s work and life.

This chapter reviews the ideas and reception of Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It focuses on a single, as yet untold, aspect: how Economic Consequences fits into the context of debates about the construction of the memory of the Great War. It asks: ‘What role did Keynes and The Economic Consequences of the Peace play in the formation of the “futility myth” which dominates British popular perception of the First World War to this day?’

This chapter discusses how the argument for a right to equal pay for work of equal value started and how it developed. It starts by noting that equal pay was promised during the Great War and then discusses the promises to implement it as a right in legislation in the following years, the failures to fulfil those promises and false steps, until the right became established. It then discusses the current problems with that right. Overall it explains the refusal to make substantive comparisons between men’s and women’s work.

In the space of thirty years the circumstances of Australian nationhood changed irrevocably. The country’s strategic dependence on Britain drew it into two wars that originated in European rivalry and together exhausted European supremacy. The first strained the political stability of the combatants and cut the flows of trade and investment that sustained their prosperity. The second destroyed their empires, leaving the continent in thrall to the two superpowers to its east and west. Britain, victorious in both wars, was perhaps the most diminished by their cumulative effects and its fading imperial certainties created doubt and division in Australia. Only as the second war spread to the Pacific, and Australia found itself isolated and in danger of invasion, came a belated recognition of the need to reconstruct the nation for changed circumstances.

Underlines that it is time to recognise the wartime endeavours of British musicians who served King and Country during the Great War. Amongst so much fear and death, music exuded life, purpose, identity and belonging. Music was not ephemeral; in all its different forms music was an essential and highly valued part of everyday life in Britain’s armed forces during the Great War.

The introduction explains why comparatively little is known about the musical cultures of the British armed forces despite music’s quotidian nature in the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Flying Corps/Royal Air Force. This book will therefore examine the formal and informal applications of music in the British forces on land, sea and air, during their periods of work, rest and play, in military camps, on ships, in aerodromes, on the battlefields, in hospitals and prisoner of war camps, theatres, cinemas and canteen huts. It argues why the musical cultures of Britain’s armed forces should be examined in the social, cultural and military contexts in which they developed.