Rhetoric and representation

Although Britain has not had the same bad press as the USA has had recently for its imperialist military interventions, it has been involved in war five times since the Labour government took office in 1997. Furthermore, a close look at Britain's international involvement reveals that there has been hardly a decade in the last three hundred years when Britain was not engaged in some military conflict. Far from attempting to cover British military history since the Civil War, this volume will present case studies on different aspects of war in different historical contexts. Since most of the contributions are indebted to a Cultural Studies approach, they cover questions of representation, especially the representation of individual wars in the mass media and in cultural memory, and address the impact of war on gender, ethnicity and power. Furthermore, they illustrate how war, through its representations and the circulation of those representations in social discourses, becomes part of the complex process of the construction of identity and how different social groups compete for control over representations and memory.