Since the beginning of training at Huachuca, sport and entertainment had been used as diversions from boredom and uncertainty as at other forts. For the 92nd and 93rd Infantry Divisions, however, the latter was stronger than elsewhere as doubt hung over the assignment of the men once training ended. The commander of the fort therefore had the idea of offering a level of leisure and cultural exposure unknown to blacks in civilian life, even though he perpetuated stereotypes about the natural talents of African Americans for sports and music. In a unique gesture of recognition, however, he granted artists-soldiers and -Wacs based in Huachuca new responsibility in the programming and choice of entertainment, even opening the fort to the fine arts. This attitude certainly contributed to explaining the non-explosion of the fort during the war.

Percy Shelley’s interest in the visual arts (painting and sculpture, but also monuments and landscapes) was much heightened by the years spent in Italy, where in letters and notebooks, he records a wide range of encounters and sharpened his powers of observation, perception, and description. This chapter presents several important contexts and instances, from accounts in his letters to Thomas Love Peacock of the paintings in Bologna that particularly moved him (such as Raphael’s St. Cecilia), to his ekphrastic verses on a painting of the head of Medusa, to his wide-ranging descriptive notes on sculptures in Rome and in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. These are situated historically in terms of increased access to, and engagement with, the visual arts in the period, and as important sites for Shelley to work through the imaginative transmutation of the visual into the visionary in his own poetry and poetic theory.

The concluding Chapter 8 examines the commemorative afterlives of the West India Regiments in Britain and the Caribbean. Placing this within the wider context of the centenary of the First World War, including the ’culture wars’ that have occurred around how the British Empire is remembered, the chapter considers the acquisition, creation and display of the regiments’ material culture.

Jazz photographs are evidentiary documents, nostalgic memorials, and contributors to a romantic mythology and mystique. Sight and sound are combined and made more potent by mutual association. But classic jazz photographs do not exist in the realm of myth alone. Jazz photographs intersected with trends in portraiture, documentary, and advertising during the peak decades of the music’s popularity. They described the social contours of the music– the places where it was heard and the communities formed around it. And images helped sell the music, whether promoting performances or recordings. Photographs also made African American artistic innovation more obvious as the drive for equality gained momentum. The symbiotic relationship between the two art forms has been strengthened over more than one hundred years. Publicity portraiture, photojournalism, album cover imagery, street photography, African American photography, and archival and exhibition curation have all probed the music’s deep beauty for visual analogues and associations.

The first chapter examines contemporary exhibitions inside and outside Iran as historiographical sites of knowledge production about modernist Iranian art. This chapter focuses on two case studies, the exhibition Iran Modern (2013–2014) and the canceled exhibition project Tehran Modern, which was supposed to present artworks from Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection at the National Gallery in Berlin. In light of these exhibitions outside of Iran, this chapter also investigates the history, legacy, and exhibition activities of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as the official institution for modern art in Iran. A comparative perspective shows how these exhibitions repeated and strengthened the historiographical paradigm that modernist Iranian art production symbolizes the country’s successful modernization and secularization during the Pahlavi rule. A close analysis demonstrates that the depoliticized reading of Iranian modernist art in the respective exhibition contexts serves different contemporary political interests.

This essay discusses the role of East Anglia in the biography and literary works of Sebald. Sebald lived from 1970 until his premature death in 2001 in the eastern part of England, whose charm as a remote stretch of land has left its mark in his writings in many ways. As early as 1974, Sebald published a travelogue in the travel section of the newspaper Die Zeit, describing ‘A Leisurely Tour through Norfolk and Suffolk’. This journalistic piece anticipated the portrayal of East Anglia in his later narrative texts. Similarly, East Anglia repeatedly became a theme in Sebald’s poetry with motifs returning in the later prose. The essay focuses on After Nature and The Rings of Saturn, but also includes Austerlitz and the Corsica Project. To conclude, it examines the extent to which Sebald’s account can be understood as a faithful description of East Anglia, or rather, as the essay argues, as a poetic portrait of the area that constituted Sebald’s second “Heimat”.

In January 1917, the Red Cross Shakespeare Exhibition, which opened at the Grafton Galleries in London, was advertised with two different posters. One displayed an oversize red cross on a white background – the Red Cross emblem and the English national flag. The other depicted Shakespeare’s coat of arms. The exhibition, described in the press as the most comprehensive show of Shakespeareana ever exhibited, was originally curated in Manchester as part of the celebrations of the 1916 Tercentenary, the commemoration of the three hundred-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. In London, it became part of the war effort, the way civilians at the ‘Home Front’ did their bit to help the British Army in the trenches. The exhibition, a successful charity venture, moved to London thanks to the collaboration of actor-manager Martin Harvey and the British Red Cross, one of several wartime collaborations between the British NPO and the theatrical profession to bring relief to Western Front soldiers. The poster portraying Shakespeare’s coat of arms aimed to present Shakespeare as an English gentleman, to counteract the influence of the Baconians who questioned Shakespeare’s authorship. This exhibition was one of several ways in which Shakespeare’s cultural capital was enlisted to raise funds in wartime.

Booksellers were not necessarily concerned with describing physical properties, and sometimes gave no condition details at all; but in their catalogues can be traced something of the changing fortunes of some well-known early printed books, reflecting in turn the changing tastes and preoccupations of successive collectors. This serves as background to a very gradual change in understanding of old bindings, particularly by W.H.J.Weale.

In representing print in the context of the history of human knowledge more generally, the national libraries were at an advantage. However, while they could offer permanent exhibitions, whether of books or antiquities, they could not easily present them in the contexts of modern achievements. For this, the multitude of temporary exhibitions, presenting old and new objects side by side, offered another perspective. They also reached audiences unfamiliar with the fixed presentations whether in London or Paris.

Taking as its point of departure the preeminent association between momentary experience and urban existence, this chapter expands on how the modern city’s relationship to temporariness is conceived by approaching it through particular forms of temporary urban space. It focuses in turn on several sites that emerged (and subsequently vanished) in the early twentieth century, each of which embodies a metropolis in microcosm: the White City exhibitions, the trench system on the Western Front, and the elaborate sets that were constructed for an expanding British film industry. In drawing a connection between literature’s interest in temporariness in this period and the pseudo-cities that parallel it – exhibitionary, military, and cinematographic – the chapter charts how responses to urban ephemera in the work of such writers as Isaac Rosenberg, Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, and Katherine Mansfield are inflected through these spaces, as well as how such responses evolve across the century’s opening decades.