Barbaric Anti-Modernism: Representations of the "Hun" in Britain, North America, Australia, and Beyond

TitleBarbaric Anti-Modernism: Representations of the "Hun" in Britain, North America, Australia, and Beyond
Publication TypeBook Chapter
Year of Publication2009
AuthorsGullace, Nicoletta F.
EditorJames, Pearl
Book TitlePicture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture
Pagination61-78
PublisherUniversity of Nebraska Press
CityLincoln
Abstract

The term "Hun"—long used to denote those engaged in savage or brutal behavior—emerged as a popular and even casual epithet for the Germans during World War I. While the term could be used either facetiously or ominously, it become iconographic shorthand, evoking themes of racial "otherness" and primitive atavism that recast a modern European adversary as something far more menacing. Posters and other contemporary media functioned to render World War I as a war against the primitive, where heroic modern man battled to save European civilization from a return to savagery. Contemporary artists, writers, and jurists represented the war not as an exercise in modern annihiliation, as is the focus of much scholarly work on the Great War, but as a crusade against a foe who was the antithesis of modernity itself. The image of the Hun in British, American, and Australian war posters, explored in this chapter, reveals the complex juxtaposition of the primitive and the modern in wartime iconography.

URLhttps://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska-paperback/9780803226104/
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609691803

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