Ephemera and the construction of First World War life writing.

In the years following the First World War, memoirs of combatants and those who experienced war in other roles proliferated the print market with their autobiographies. People made sense of their war experiences through writing, describing where and how they had experienced the conflict, making sense of the war's place in their life narrative. This writing hinged on ephemera as a vehicle for expression – authors used this material to make sense of their narratives. When life writing about war is looked at through an ephemeral lens – how people related to ephemera, used it in their writing, and understood relatable moments in their life through it - it not only becomes clear just how frequently people imagined and explained the world around them using paper, but also how much paper influenced the everyday. The memoirs consulted for this research consist of approximately seventy pieces of life writing written and (mostly) published by British authors between 1915 and 2018 who had some experience of the First World War. In this life writing, the everyday was explained through common types of ephemera, from real items kept in personal archives to imagined imagery which helped explain the circumstances the authors found themselves in. Writers of memoirs used paper ephemera - whether described, imagined or actually reproduced - to engage their readers and connect with their wartime experiences. Far from being throwaway objects, ephemera structured and influenced life writing about war in ways that profoundly shaped how the British public encountered war narratives.