Feeling Memory: Remembering Wartime Childhoods in France - Paperback

by Lindsey Dodd (Author)

What did it feel like to be a child in France during World War II? Feeling Memory is an affective exploration of children's lives in wartime France and the ways they are remembered.

Lindsey Dodd draws on the recorded oral narratives of a hundred people to examine the variety of experiences children had during the war. She considers different aspects of remembering, underscoring the centrality of emotion to memory. This book covers a wide range of locations--the country and the city, Occupied France and the Free Zone--and situations--well-off and poor children, those separated from their families and those with them; it places Jewish children's experiences alongside non-Jewish children's. Against the backdrop of momentous events, readers encounter children playing, working, eating, thinking, doing, and feeling.

An investigation of the emotions of history, Feeling Memory argues for the transformative potential of affect theory and affective methodologies in oral history and the history of everyday life. This book makes major contributions to the history of France during World War II, understandings of children's lives in war, and the use of memory in historical and oral history analysis.

Author Biography

Lindsey Dodd is an independent historian and oral historian. Until 2023 she was reader in modern European history at the University of Huddersfield. She is the author of French Children Under the Allied Bombs, 1940-1945: An Oral History (2016) and coeditor of Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime (2018). She is also part of the editorial team for the journal Oral History.