| Abstract | Over the last decade, ‘cultural memory’ has emerged as a useful umbrella term to describe the complex ways in which societies remember their past using a variety of media. Where earlier discussions of collective memory had a thematic focus and were concerned above all with identifying the ‘sites of memory’ that act as placeholders for the memories of particular groups, attention has been shifting in recent years to the cultural processes by which memories become shared in the first place. It has become increasingly apparent that the memories that are shared within generations and across different generations are the product of public acts of remembrance using a variety of media. Stories, both oral and written, images, museums, monuments: these all work together in creating and sustaining ‘sites of memory’. Thus everyone reading this issue of EJES will have some ‘recollection’ of the First World War, but since most readers were not alive in 1914, these ‘recollections’ are vicarious ones, the product of accumulated exposure to a common reservoir of products, including photographs and documentaries, museums, personal accounts, histories and novels.
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