Susan Grayzel's The Age of the Gas Mask continues her scholarly examination of the sociocultural effects of industrialized warfare in interwar Britain. In this latest study, Grayzel focuses on the gas mask as the object that best symbolized and expressed how advanced warfare technologies in World War I increasingly occupied the minds of soldiers and civilians alike in the 1920s and '30s. Grayzel argues that the gas mask "embodied a complex emotional life" (p. 4) at a time when the possibility of aerochemical attack made total warfare seem terrifyingly inevitable. Furthermore, the widespread provision of gas masks represented attempts to expand state power during the perceived national/imperial crises of the 1930s.
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