"Sweet memory clings" : Languages of Mourning in British WWI Epitaphs.

The purpose and aim of this study was to examine, identify and account for general understandings and expressions of grief in family members of dead First World War servicemen. The study found its theoretical framework in Jay Winter’s term ”languages of mourning” and his hypothesis that First World War commemoration mainly drew on ”traditional” rather than ”modern” themes and languages, as expressed in his book Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. The study used a qualitative method of text analysis and compared its findings to previous research. The source material used in the study was reports on headstone inscriptions and texts from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The epitaphs used in the study were from three different British war cemeteries. The main findings of the study is that the languages of mourning used in the epitaphs mainly were traditional rather than modern, in Jay Winter’s terminology. Much like Winter argued, the most common themes and thus langauges of mourning are those of ”religion” and ”memory” or ”sentimentality.” Unlike Winter, however, this study also found the use of ”personal details” about the dead or their families to be of common usage. Explicit expressions of grief or patriotism were, however, less common