Modernism/modernity

Bette London's Posthumous Lives: World War I and the Culture of Memory makes a significant intervention into the evolving discourse on memorialization practices, perhaps most distinctly in its conceptualization of posthumous life. London defines the postwar "culture of memory" relationally, reading commemorative practices that inherit, challenge, and reactivate forgotten histories of WWI in writing and material culture. She argues that the impulse to remember is "itself a monument to the inevitable failure or inadequacy of memory" (20). By performing a series of attentive symptomatic readings, Posthumous Lives creates a dialogue between literary and memorial practices to advance our understandings of each, while demonstrating their unexpected intersections (22). London remains, however, cautious of the capaciousness of terms [End Page 390] such as "memory" and "culture," invoking practices of "commemoration of commemoration" and the formulation of "culture of memory" throughout her work (29).

Yet London's main interlocutors include familiar scholars of memory and elegy, such as Jay Winter, Marianne Hirsch, Jahan Ramazani, Diana Fuss, and Geoff Dyer. She considers objects across genres: memorabilia books, war-poetry like that of Charles Hamilton Sorley, literature by Virginia Woolf, and commemorative art installations. As such, Posthumous Lives belongs to a wave of recent scholarship reflecting on public works of commemoration, specifically World War I following its centenary, and takes its place among important works on WWI and memory, such as Winter's Sites of Memory, Sites of Morning (1995), Bart Ziino's Remembering the First World War (2015), and Alice Kelly's Commemorative Modernisms (2020). These studies echo a public reckoning not only with what—or who—is remembered but also with how memory is represented. London reads both familiar war-writings and lesser-known source materials that appeared after the war to analyze these texts' afterlives and the audiences they continue to address.

Posthumous Lives determines that the commemoration memorial is a "self-(re)generating process, taking on a life and legacy of its own," opening with a comparison of the 1920 Cenotaph and the 2014 Tower of London poppies installation (20). London argues that the aesthetic formation of these public memorials reveals how expressive forms affect public audiences. She negotiates the intersection between a private and sentimental experience that occurs in a manufactured public space, both in the introduction and throughout the book. In conversation with Hirsch, London argues that the centenary installation was effectively post-memory, because it addresses those without a living memory of the war (4). Turning to another centenary commemoration of the war, which she returns to in a later chapter, London considers the subject and perspective of the Shot at Dawn photographic exhibition (2014), which provokes a spectator by withholding the subject and focuses instead on the site of the execution (17). These introductory temporal comparisons clarify that this book ultimately centers afterlives, appearing in both familiar and lesser-known materials from WWI, and underscores audience address created through memorialization practices.

The first chapter, "Material Boys," is of particular interest for London's development of posthumous life and material afterlives. She opens and closes the chapter with a case study about a mother's memoir for her fallen son in autobiographical fragments. London focuses her attention on the paradox of the material culture of remembrance during this time, which concerned the question of "how to reconstruct a life that may not have enough material to fill a volume" (33–4). Through a series of examples, she considers the afterlives created through cultural objects of commemorative biography, arguing that these volumes create a new type of hybrid biography (35). Because of the impersonal nature of public memorials, families felt the need to record these lives by creating a household possession. These memorial volumes are effectively characterized by fragmentation and excess, which marks the incalculability of loss. Attending to these material sources not only provides a more complete history of a forgotten archive but also interrogates the reinvention of biography as a genre for commemorating missing subjects. London argues that these...