War tourisms: 'Englishness,' art and the First World War

This article analyses how constructions of Englishness and landscape in the First World War and after were marked by a series of double displacements. British official war artists' work was published as propaganda. In books s uch as The Western Front, northern France was judged against an 'Englishnes s' itself being renegotiated through its encounter with an imagined German stereotype. After the war, a market for tours organized to be the 'Silent C ities' of British war cemeteries on the actual battlefields developed while artists began anxiously to tour the English landscape search for a lost co mpleteness and identity as a poetic counterpart to a missing generation kil led in the war. The land is often imagined as feminine in images of repleni shment, nurture, and fertility, but I argue here that during and after the Great War, through ritualized encounters of war and peace, home and abroad, a complex gendering of 'Englishness' was worked out in landscapes, imagine d both as female and male, and sometimes understood as literally composed o f bodies.