Mark Rawlinson
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184560
- eISBN:
- 9780191674303
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184560.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book is the first study to provide a detailed critical and historical survey of British literary culture in wartime. Concerned as much with war as with writing, it explores the significance of ...
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This book is the first study to provide a detailed critical and historical survey of British literary culture in wartime. Concerned as much with war as with writing, it explores the significance of cultural representations of violence to the administration of the war effort. A theoretical account of the symbolic practices that connect military violence to policy provides a framework for analysing imaginative and documentary literature in its relation both to propaganda and to Peoples' War ideals of social reconstruction. The book evaluates wartime fictions and memoirs in the context of official and unofficial discourses about military aviation, the Blitz, campaigns in North Africa, war aims, the conscript Army and the Home Front, prisoners of war, and the Holocaust. It uncovers the processes by which the meanings the war had for participants were produced, and provides an extensive bibliographical resource for future scholarship.Less
This book is the first study to provide a detailed critical and historical survey of British literary culture in wartime. Concerned as much with war as with writing, it explores the significance of cultural representations of violence to the administration of the war effort. A theoretical account of the symbolic practices that connect military violence to policy provides a framework for analysing imaginative and documentary literature in its relation both to propaganda and to Peoples' War ideals of social reconstruction. The book evaluates wartime fictions and memoirs in the context of official and unofficial discourses about military aviation, the Blitz, campaigns in North Africa, war aims, the conscript Army and the Home Front, prisoners of war, and the Holocaust. It uncovers the processes by which the meanings the war had for participants were produced, and provides an extensive bibliographical resource for future scholarship.
Neil Corcoran
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780198186908
- eISBN:
- 9780191719011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186908.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter offers a reading of Bowen's collection of Second World War short stories, The Demon Lover and Other Stories, proposing it as a book of unhappy returns. Studies of dislocation, the ...
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This chapter offers a reading of Bowen's collection of Second World War short stories, The Demon Lover and Other Stories, proposing it as a book of unhappy returns. Studies of dislocation, the stories have their Anglo-Irish element, even though they are set mainly in the London of the Blitz. The chapter also considers matters of literary allusion and reference, as well as issues of gender together with sexual and social disruption. The chapter concludes with a lengthy reading of the figure of the apparently supernatural ghost in one of Bowen's greatest short stories, The Demon Lover, suggesting an influence from T. S. Eliot, an affinity with William Golding, and an alliance with Freud's conception of the ‘uncanny’. Thus, in various ways the story is the representation of crisis.Less
This chapter offers a reading of Bowen's collection of Second World War short stories, The Demon Lover and Other Stories, proposing it as a book of unhappy returns. Studies of dislocation, the stories have their Anglo-Irish element, even though they are set mainly in the London of the Blitz. The chapter also considers matters of literary allusion and reference, as well as issues of gender together with sexual and social disruption. The chapter concludes with a lengthy reading of the figure of the apparently supernatural ghost in one of Bowen's greatest short stories, The Demon Lover, suggesting an influence from T. S. Eliot, an affinity with William Golding, and an alliance with Freud's conception of the ‘uncanny’. Thus, in various ways the story is the representation of crisis.
Patrick Deer
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199239887
- eISBN:
- 9780191716782
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239887.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Chapter 3 explores how the World War Two home front was defined and haunted by its founding blackouts: censorship, lack of information, the trauma, sensory deprivation, and destruction of the Blitz. ...
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Chapter 3 explores how the World War Two home front was defined and haunted by its founding blackouts: censorship, lack of information, the trauma, sensory deprivation, and destruction of the Blitz. Yet, it contends, the black out offered opportunities for resistance. In Winston Churchill's panoramic speeches, J.B.Priestley's populist broadcasts, Humphrey Jennings' ethnographic propaganda films, or the surreal radio comedy of ITMA, the official culture offered the spectacle of the People “taking it.” The chapter argues that the state's commitment to the arts created boom conditions, yet its oversight seemed to threaten the very existence of literature. It argues that the Blitz writing of Henry Green and James Hanley reveals a culture haunted by repressions, foreclosures and disavowals. In more fugitive forms like the short story, reportage, or essay, they joined their peers in practising a modernism in camouflage that looted the resources of a literary tradition shattered by war.Less
Chapter 3 explores how the World War Two home front was defined and haunted by its founding blackouts: censorship, lack of information, the trauma, sensory deprivation, and destruction of the Blitz. Yet, it contends, the black out offered opportunities for resistance. In Winston Churchill's panoramic speeches, J.B.Priestley's populist broadcasts, Humphrey Jennings' ethnographic propaganda films, or the surreal radio comedy of ITMA, the official culture offered the spectacle of the People “taking it.” The chapter argues that the state's commitment to the arts created boom conditions, yet its oversight seemed to threaten the very existence of literature. It argues that the Blitz writing of Henry Green and James Hanley reveals a culture haunted by repressions, foreclosures and disavowals. In more fugitive forms like the short story, reportage, or essay, they joined their peers in practising a modernism in camouflage that looted the resources of a literary tradition shattered by war.
Patrick Deer
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199239887
- eISBN:
- 9780191716782
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239887.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Chapter 4 examines wartime writers' challenges to official projections of an “island fortress” under siege at the heart of a loyal, but distant empire. During a wartime revival of popular ...
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Chapter 4 examines wartime writers' challenges to official projections of an “island fortress” under siege at the heart of a loyal, but distant empire. During a wartime revival of popular imperialism, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen excavated buried histories of empire, representing the home front as a hallucinatory, haunted space. The chapter explores their secret war work as agents in British intelligence and their ironic representations of the corrosive effects of wartime surveillance, secrecy and espionage. In the dislocated perspectives offered by unpatriotic, transgressive figures like the spy, the spiv, the wounded veteran, the adulterous wife, or the rootless “mobile” woman conscripted into the war effort Bowen and Greene turn a sceptical eye on the mythology of “Deep England” and the “People's War.” Their work reveals that the island fortress was constituted by the contradictory relations between an insular Englishness, an expansive British imperial identity, and cosmopolitan traditions of anti-colonialism.Less
Chapter 4 examines wartime writers' challenges to official projections of an “island fortress” under siege at the heart of a loyal, but distant empire. During a wartime revival of popular imperialism, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen excavated buried histories of empire, representing the home front as a hallucinatory, haunted space. The chapter explores their secret war work as agents in British intelligence and their ironic representations of the corrosive effects of wartime surveillance, secrecy and espionage. In the dislocated perspectives offered by unpatriotic, transgressive figures like the spy, the spiv, the wounded veteran, the adulterous wife, or the rootless “mobile” woman conscripted into the war effort Bowen and Greene turn a sceptical eye on the mythology of “Deep England” and the “People's War.” Their work reveals that the island fortress was constituted by the contradictory relations between an insular Englishness, an expansive British imperial identity, and cosmopolitan traditions of anti-colonialism.
Mark Rawlinson
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184560
- eISBN:
- 9780191674303
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184560.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter investigates the process by which Luftwaffe's attacks on the United Kingdom cohered into an event known as the Blitz. The new social and psychological geography of the metropolis revises ...
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This chapter investigates the process by which Luftwaffe's attacks on the United Kingdom cohered into an event known as the Blitz. The new social and psychological geography of the metropolis revises our thinking about urban representation. The absence of the human body from aestheticizing descriptions of ruined cityscapes is fundamental to the reinvention of London as an emblem of positive wartime outcomes in both the military and political spheres. Interactions of architectonic space and subjectivity in fictional and travel writing are discussed with particular emphasis on the work of Vera Brittain, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, and William Sansom.Less
This chapter investigates the process by which Luftwaffe's attacks on the United Kingdom cohered into an event known as the Blitz. The new social and psychological geography of the metropolis revises our thinking about urban representation. The absence of the human body from aestheticizing descriptions of ruined cityscapes is fundamental to the reinvention of London as an emblem of positive wartime outcomes in both the military and political spheres. Interactions of architectonic space and subjectivity in fictional and travel writing are discussed with particular emphasis on the work of Vera Brittain, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, and William Sansom.
Jean Baumgarten
Jerold C. Frakes (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199276332
- eISBN:
- 9780191699894
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199276332.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism, Religion and Literature
The Hebrew Bible was the foundation on which most of Old Yiddish literature was based. The Bible played a central role as the basis of education and the transmission of Judaism to the Jewish masses, ...
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The Hebrew Bible was the foundation on which most of Old Yiddish literature was based. The Bible played a central role as the basis of education and the transmission of Judaism to the Jewish masses, whether via glossaries, dictionaries, concordances, verse or prose translations, or homiletic commentaries. It also formed the textual basis on which was built the Jewish literary tradition in the vernacular: epics, romance, and biblical poems and dramas. The translations by Isaac Blitz and Alexander Witzenhausen had scarcely any impact on their own era due to the expanding importance of the Tsene-rene. Nonetheless, they proved that vernacular translation was a territory favourable to experimentation and renewal of earlier modes in the transmission of the sacred traditions.Less
The Hebrew Bible was the foundation on which most of Old Yiddish literature was based. The Bible played a central role as the basis of education and the transmission of Judaism to the Jewish masses, whether via glossaries, dictionaries, concordances, verse or prose translations, or homiletic commentaries. It also formed the textual basis on which was built the Jewish literary tradition in the vernacular: epics, romance, and biblical poems and dramas. The translations by Isaac Blitz and Alexander Witzenhausen had scarcely any impact on their own era due to the expanding importance of the Tsene-rene. Nonetheless, they proved that vernacular translation was a territory favourable to experimentation and renewal of earlier modes in the transmission of the sacred traditions.
Richard Farmer
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719091889
- eISBN:
- 9781526109644
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719091889.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
The utility dream palace is a cultural history of cinemagoing and the cinema exhibition industry in Britain during the Second World War, a period of massive audiences in which vast swathes of the ...
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The utility dream palace is a cultural history of cinemagoing and the cinema exhibition industry in Britain during the Second World War, a period of massive audiences in which vast swathes of the British population went to the pictures on a regular basis. Yet for all that wartime films have received a great deal of academic attention, and have been discussed in terms of the escapist pleasures they offered, the experiential pleasures offered by the cinemas in which such films were watched were inextricably connected to the places and times in which they operated. British cinemas – and the people who worked in, owned and visited them – were acutely sensitive to their spatial and temporal locations, unable to escape the war and intimately bound up in and contributing to the public’s experience of it. Combining oral history, extensive archival research, and a wealth of material gathered from contemporary trade papers, fan magazines and newspapers, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of both the cinema’s position in wartime society, and the impact that the war had on the cinema as a social practice. Dealing with subjects as diverse as the blackout, the blitz, evacuation, advertising, staffing and conscription, Entertainments Tax, showmanship and clothes rationing, The utility dream palace asserts that the cinema was, for many people, a central feature of wartime life, and argues that the history of British cinemas and cinemagoing between 1939 and 1945 is, in many ways, the history of wartime Britain.Less
The utility dream palace is a cultural history of cinemagoing and the cinema exhibition industry in Britain during the Second World War, a period of massive audiences in which vast swathes of the British population went to the pictures on a regular basis. Yet for all that wartime films have received a great deal of academic attention, and have been discussed in terms of the escapist pleasures they offered, the experiential pleasures offered by the cinemas in which such films were watched were inextricably connected to the places and times in which they operated. British cinemas – and the people who worked in, owned and visited them – were acutely sensitive to their spatial and temporal locations, unable to escape the war and intimately bound up in and contributing to the public’s experience of it. Combining oral history, extensive archival research, and a wealth of material gathered from contemporary trade papers, fan magazines and newspapers, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of both the cinema’s position in wartime society, and the impact that the war had on the cinema as a social practice. Dealing with subjects as diverse as the blackout, the blitz, evacuation, advertising, staffing and conscription, Entertainments Tax, showmanship and clothes rationing, The utility dream palace asserts that the cinema was, for many people, a central feature of wartime life, and argues that the history of British cinemas and cinemagoing between 1939 and 1945 is, in many ways, the history of wartime Britain.
Beryl Pong
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198840923
- eISBN:
- 9780191876530
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198840923.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
What happens to the concept of wartime in the 1940s? For the Duration excavates British late modernism’s relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future. Coloured by ...
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What happens to the concept of wartime in the 1940s? For the Duration excavates British late modernism’s relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future. Coloured by the trauma of past violence and dread of those to come, the Second World War and its defining military strategy, civilian aerial bombardment, upended straightforward understandings of past, present, and future. Identifying a constellation of temporalities and affects under three tropes—time capsules, time zones, and ruins—the book contends that Second World Wartime is a pivotal moment when wartime surpassed the boundaries of a specific state of emergency, becoming first routine and then open-ended. It scrutinizes a variety of cultural artefacts, from life-writings to short stories, from novels to film and painting, that formally registered the distinctiveness of this wartime through a complex feedback between anticipation and retrospection. While offering a strong foundation for new readers of the mid-century, the book and its overall theoretical focus on chronophobia will be an important intervention for those already working in the field.Less
What happens to the concept of wartime in the 1940s? For the Duration excavates British late modernism’s relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future. Coloured by the trauma of past violence and dread of those to come, the Second World War and its defining military strategy, civilian aerial bombardment, upended straightforward understandings of past, present, and future. Identifying a constellation of temporalities and affects under three tropes—time capsules, time zones, and ruins—the book contends that Second World Wartime is a pivotal moment when wartime surpassed the boundaries of a specific state of emergency, becoming first routine and then open-ended. It scrutinizes a variety of cultural artefacts, from life-writings to short stories, from novels to film and painting, that formally registered the distinctiveness of this wartime through a complex feedback between anticipation and retrospection. While offering a strong foundation for new readers of the mid-century, the book and its overall theoretical focus on chronophobia will be an important intervention for those already working in the field.
Lara Feigel
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748639502
- eISBN:
- 9780748652938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639502.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter examines the British literature responding to the cinematic and photographic qualities of the Blitz. The cinematic properties of the Blitz were perhaps best captured in literature by ...
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This chapter examines the British literature responding to the cinematic and photographic qualities of the Blitz. The cinematic properties of the Blitz were perhaps best captured in literature by three wartime firemen: Stephen Spender, Henry Green, and William Sansom. The wartime fiction of Elizabeth Bowen had always had an unnerving propensity to stir into life. Sansom's ‘Fireman Flower’ turns both the living and the dead into ghosts. Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear and Bowen's The Heat of the Day expose the arbitrary nature of international politics in a war that is fought by automata in the sky and by ghosts on the ground. The Blitz literature was necessarily cinematic because the bombing, like the film and the photograph, thrust its victims into the deathly tense of the has-been-there.Less
This chapter examines the British literature responding to the cinematic and photographic qualities of the Blitz. The cinematic properties of the Blitz were perhaps best captured in literature by three wartime firemen: Stephen Spender, Henry Green, and William Sansom. The wartime fiction of Elizabeth Bowen had always had an unnerving propensity to stir into life. Sansom's ‘Fireman Flower’ turns both the living and the dead into ghosts. Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear and Bowen's The Heat of the Day expose the arbitrary nature of international politics in a war that is fought by automata in the sky and by ghosts on the ground. The Blitz literature was necessarily cinematic because the bombing, like the film and the photograph, thrust its victims into the deathly tense of the has-been-there.
Geoffrey G. Field
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199604111
- eISBN:
- 9780191731686
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199604111.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Political History
The chapter discusses German bombing of British cities September 1940 to May 1941. It analyses government plans to protect the civilian population and public responses to the raids ...
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The chapter discusses German bombing of British cities September 1940 to May 1941. It analyses government plans to protect the civilian population and public responses to the raids both in London and provincial cities. In working-class neighbourhoods of London and elsewhere people often chose their own makeshift mass shelters, most famously the London Underground. These mass shelters, which developed a social life of their own, became the focal point of public debate about air-raid protection and sites of social exploration for journalists, photographers, artists, and writers—some of whom saw them as microcosms of democratic community and active citizenship. The chapter examines representations of the sheltering population by photographer Bill Brandt and artist Henry Moore and, compared to the public recrimination and class prejudice evident during the first evacuation, the emergence of more positive imagery about workers and the concept of a ‘people's war’. Less
The chapter discusses German bombing of British cities September 1940 to May 1941. It analyses government plans to protect the civilian population and public responses to the raids both in London and provincial cities. In working-class neighbourhoods of London and elsewhere people often chose their own makeshift mass shelters, most famously the London Underground. These mass shelters, which developed a social life of their own, became the focal point of public debate about air-raid protection and sites of social exploration for journalists, photographers, artists, and writers—some of whom saw them as microcosms of democratic community and active citizenship. The chapter examines representations of the sheltering population by photographer Bill Brandt and artist Henry Moore and, compared to the public recrimination and class prejudice evident during the first evacuation, the emergence of more positive imagery about workers and the concept of a ‘people's war’.
Andrew R. Martin
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496812407
- eISBN:
- 9781496812445
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496812407.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
This chapter focuses on the US Navy Steel Band's adolescent years—1978 to 1995. In 1976 alone they performed nearly four hundred performances as part of the US Navy's all-out publicity blitz to ...
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This chapter focuses on the US Navy Steel Band's adolescent years—1978 to 1995. In 1976 alone they performed nearly four hundred performances as part of the US Navy's all-out publicity blitz to celebrate America's bicentennial. Compared to the high-flying times of the 1950s and 1960s, life changed significantly for the members of the US Navy Steel Band during the 1970s and 1980s. Gone were the days of extended Caribbean tours as the band now focused efforts inland and became a regular fixture at festivals across the continental United States. The chapter also examines a period in which the band welcomed its first female member, recorded their final studio album, embarked on their final major international tour, and combated the negative public image perceptions of the post-Vietnam US military.Less
This chapter focuses on the US Navy Steel Band's adolescent years—1978 to 1995. In 1976 alone they performed nearly four hundred performances as part of the US Navy's all-out publicity blitz to celebrate America's bicentennial. Compared to the high-flying times of the 1950s and 1960s, life changed significantly for the members of the US Navy Steel Band during the 1970s and 1980s. Gone were the days of extended Caribbean tours as the band now focused efforts inland and became a regular fixture at festivals across the continental United States. The chapter also examines a period in which the band welcomed its first female member, recorded their final studio album, embarked on their final major international tour, and combated the negative public image perceptions of the post-Vietnam US military.
Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes and Heather Norris Nicholson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474420730
- eISBN:
- 9781474453530
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420730.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter engages with theoretical and historical perspectives on gender, post-colonialism and new media with the aim to trace the visual literacy defined by several examples of British women ...
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This chapter engages with theoretical and historical perspectives on gender, post-colonialism and new media with the aim to trace the visual literacy defined by several examples of British women amateur film and media practice. This literacy appears to inform new understandings of amateur/new media making and to elucidate how gender-driven visual narratives of gender, race and national identities function today within global online networks. It explores issues of belonging, home-and-abroad mind frames, and of colonial and post-colonial identity-building within postcolonial and feminist theories. The theoretical discourse is anchored in detailed analyses of the amateur film made by Eileen Healey of the all-women tragic mountaineering expedition up the Chy Oyu summit in 1959, and of several exceptional scenes filmed in colour by Rosie Newman during the London Blitz, including British military drills during the Second World War and portraits of British colonial subjects and sites. Finally, it identifies the ways in which some documentary filmmakers have recently re-framed and re-contextualized similar footage, such as Beatrice Blackwood’s and Ursula Graham Bower’s colonial amateur (ethnographic) films, either as visual ‘fillers’ for new perspectives on the history of the British Empire, or as cinematic documents relevant to new practices in visual anthropology studiesLess
This chapter engages with theoretical and historical perspectives on gender, post-colonialism and new media with the aim to trace the visual literacy defined by several examples of British women amateur film and media practice. This literacy appears to inform new understandings of amateur/new media making and to elucidate how gender-driven visual narratives of gender, race and national identities function today within global online networks. It explores issues of belonging, home-and-abroad mind frames, and of colonial and post-colonial identity-building within postcolonial and feminist theories. The theoretical discourse is anchored in detailed analyses of the amateur film made by Eileen Healey of the all-women tragic mountaineering expedition up the Chy Oyu summit in 1959, and of several exceptional scenes filmed in colour by Rosie Newman during the London Blitz, including British military drills during the Second World War and portraits of British colonial subjects and sites. Finally, it identifies the ways in which some documentary filmmakers have recently re-framed and re-contextualized similar footage, such as Beatrice Blackwood’s and Ursula Graham Bower’s colonial amateur (ethnographic) films, either as visual ‘fillers’ for new perspectives on the history of the British Empire, or as cinematic documents relevant to new practices in visual anthropology studies
Christine Froula
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780197266267
- eISBN:
- 9780191869198
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266267.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
While First World War historians often emphasize civilians’ experience of ‘war at a distance’, the military dirigible floated over the divide between civilian and soldier, brought aerial warfare to ...
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While First World War historians often emphasize civilians’ experience of ‘war at a distance’, the military dirigible floated over the divide between civilian and soldier, brought aerial warfare to Britain’s island fortress, and inaugurated a mode of modern warfare that defies spatial and temporal containment. This essay foregrounds the zeppelin’s psychic impact on the civilian imaginary from 1914 through the Spanish Civil War to the Blitz, tracing its conceptual and aesthetic representation in diaries, letters, novels, essays, and plays by Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Rukeyser, Julian Bell and others. These writings document an unending European-civil-imperial-global war in which aerial technologies at once enlarge human powers almost beyond imagining and dwarf them to the point of negation. Inspiring both wonder and the new terror of total war, the zeppelin created a permanent change in civilians’ psychic weather and remains an inescapable presence in the sky of the mind.Less
While First World War historians often emphasize civilians’ experience of ‘war at a distance’, the military dirigible floated over the divide between civilian and soldier, brought aerial warfare to Britain’s island fortress, and inaugurated a mode of modern warfare that defies spatial and temporal containment. This essay foregrounds the zeppelin’s psychic impact on the civilian imaginary from 1914 through the Spanish Civil War to the Blitz, tracing its conceptual and aesthetic representation in diaries, letters, novels, essays, and plays by Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Rukeyser, Julian Bell and others. These writings document an unending European-civil-imperial-global war in which aerial technologies at once enlarge human powers almost beyond imagining and dwarf them to the point of negation. Inspiring both wonder and the new terror of total war, the zeppelin created a permanent change in civilians’ psychic weather and remains an inescapable presence in the sky of the mind.
Robert Mackay
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719058936
- eISBN:
- 9781781700143
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719058936.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, Military History
Defeats and setbacks gave way to victories and advances on all fronts and the steady progress to victory was established. Part of the terror of the Blitz had been the fear that it was merely the ...
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Defeats and setbacks gave way to victories and advances on all fronts and the steady progress to victory was established. Part of the terror of the Blitz had been the fear that it was merely the prelude to invasion. When the excitement of Russia's entry into the war began to withdraw, and the news of her defeats and retreats accumulated, optimism about an early end to the war or even about victory itself receded. The issue of wartime separation is addressed in this chapter. There is a patchwork of ‘stories’ each of which discloses the private anguish of one separation but which together represent the common lot. Mass-Observation's surveys confirm that most people grumbled about shortages and loss of choice. The regime of wartime tended to criminalize many who were strangers to the courts. The final trial of the war served to confirm the broader story of wartime civilian morale.Less
Defeats and setbacks gave way to victories and advances on all fronts and the steady progress to victory was established. Part of the terror of the Blitz had been the fear that it was merely the prelude to invasion. When the excitement of Russia's entry into the war began to withdraw, and the news of her defeats and retreats accumulated, optimism about an early end to the war or even about victory itself receded. The issue of wartime separation is addressed in this chapter. There is a patchwork of ‘stories’ each of which discloses the private anguish of one separation but which together represent the common lot. Mass-Observation's surveys confirm that most people grumbled about shortages and loss of choice. The regime of wartime tended to criminalize many who were strangers to the courts. The final trial of the war served to confirm the broader story of wartime civilian morale.
Mathew Thomson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199677481
- eISBN:
- 9780191757006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199677481.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Social History
This chapter examines responses to the experience of children in wartime evacuation, the Blitz, and residential homes. Two conclusions emerge. On the one hand, the story of evacuation provided ...
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This chapter examines responses to the experience of children in wartime evacuation, the Blitz, and residential homes. Two conclusions emerge. On the one hand, the story of evacuation provided evidence of the damaging effect of separation of children from families and home. On the other hand, the story of children in the Blitz emphasized the resilience of children and the appeal of new freedoms in war. The dominant resulting message was that which highlighted the need for protection and the need for home, family, and emotional security. But this also reflected war-borne anxieties experienced by adults, and it was in some respects ill-timed in that war also placed considerable strains on the stability of the familyLess
This chapter examines responses to the experience of children in wartime evacuation, the Blitz, and residential homes. Two conclusions emerge. On the one hand, the story of evacuation provided evidence of the damaging effect of separation of children from families and home. On the other hand, the story of children in the Blitz emphasized the resilience of children and the appeal of new freedoms in war. The dominant resulting message was that which highlighted the need for protection and the need for home, family, and emotional security. But this also reflected war-borne anxieties experienced by adults, and it was in some respects ill-timed in that war also placed considerable strains on the stability of the family
Geoffrey Carnall
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748640454
- eISBN:
- 9780748651948
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748640454.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses the arrival of the Friends' Ambulance Unit in India during the Second World War. Alexander and his colleagues were sent to India shortly after the Japanese entered the war and ...
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This chapter discusses the arrival of the Friends' Ambulance Unit in India during the Second World War. Alexander and his colleagues were sent to India shortly after the Japanese entered the war and quickly conquered a huge portion of south-east Asia. The Unit used the experience they had gained in the London Blitz in the cities of India that were most threatened by the air raids. The discussion also considers the Cripps mission, the ‘Quit India’ resolution and Alexander's conflict with the Viceroy.Less
This chapter discusses the arrival of the Friends' Ambulance Unit in India during the Second World War. Alexander and his colleagues were sent to India shortly after the Japanese entered the war and quickly conquered a huge portion of south-east Asia. The Unit used the experience they had gained in the London Blitz in the cities of India that were most threatened by the air raids. The discussion also considers the Cripps mission, the ‘Quit India’ resolution and Alexander's conflict with the Viceroy.
Vincent LoBrutto
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813177083
- eISBN:
- 9780813177090
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813177083.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter presents Ridley Scott’s early life. There is background on his mother, Elizabeth, his father, Francis Percy Scott, and his two brothers, Frank and Tony. The chapter examines the impact ...
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This chapter presents Ridley Scott’s early life. There is background on his mother, Elizabeth, his father, Francis Percy Scott, and his two brothers, Frank and Tony. The chapter examines the impact on Scott as a boy and young man of his father’s involvement in the military and the experience of England during World War II. The tough life Scott experienced in northeast England, living in South Shields, made him hardy and resilient. The chapter also covers Scott’s natural talent in art from a young age and his early filmgoing experiences. Ridley Scott did poorly during his early schooling but flourished while attending the West Hartlepool College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. His innate skills blossomed when he was exposed to new vistas in art and to teachers who were artists themselves.Less
This chapter presents Ridley Scott’s early life. There is background on his mother, Elizabeth, his father, Francis Percy Scott, and his two brothers, Frank and Tony. The chapter examines the impact on Scott as a boy and young man of his father’s involvement in the military and the experience of England during World War II. The tough life Scott experienced in northeast England, living in South Shields, made him hardy and resilient. The chapter also covers Scott’s natural talent in art from a young age and his early filmgoing experiences. Ridley Scott did poorly during his early schooling but flourished while attending the West Hartlepool College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. His innate skills blossomed when he was exposed to new vistas in art and to teachers who were artists themselves.
Gowan Dawson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226332734
- eISBN:
- 9780226332871
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226332871.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This epilogue examines the continuing presence of Cuvier’s law of correlation in the twentieth century. It explores how, although this presence became increasingly shadowy and even spectral, ...
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This epilogue examines the continuing presence of Cuvier’s law of correlation in the twentieth century. It explores how, although this presence became increasingly shadowy and even spectral, especially following the bombing of the Hunterian Museum in the blitz of 1941, the ghosts of correlation continued to haunt paleontologists like Stephen Jay Gould. By the continuing effects of literary replication, the spectral afterlife of this particular paleontological principle persists even in the digital media of the twenty first century.Less
This epilogue examines the continuing presence of Cuvier’s law of correlation in the twentieth century. It explores how, although this presence became increasingly shadowy and even spectral, especially following the bombing of the Hunterian Museum in the blitz of 1941, the ghosts of correlation continued to haunt paleontologists like Stephen Jay Gould. By the continuing effects of literary replication, the spectral afterlife of this particular paleontological principle persists even in the digital media of the twenty first century.
Christina Rice
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780813144269
- eISBN:
- 9780813144474
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813144269.003.0017
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter details Leslie Fenton’s enlistment in the British Royal Navy following the outbreak of World War II, and Ann’s desperate attempts to travel to London in order to be near him. Included ...
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This chapter details Leslie Fenton’s enlistment in the British Royal Navy following the outbreak of World War II, and Ann’s desperate attempts to travel to London in order to be near him. Included are descriptions of her harrowing journey through hostile waters, being stranded in Lisbon for an unknown amount of time, flying into London in the midst of bombing during the Blitz, and her work as a war correspondent and ambulance driver for the Mechanised Transport Corps. Also discussed is This Was Paris, a film starring Ann and produced by her old adversary, Warner Bros.Less
This chapter details Leslie Fenton’s enlistment in the British Royal Navy following the outbreak of World War II, and Ann’s desperate attempts to travel to London in order to be near him. Included are descriptions of her harrowing journey through hostile waters, being stranded in Lisbon for an unknown amount of time, flying into London in the midst of bombing during the Blitz, and her work as a war correspondent and ambulance driver for the Mechanised Transport Corps. Also discussed is This Was Paris, a film starring Ann and produced by her old adversary, Warner Bros.
David Ashford
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846318597
- eISBN:
- 9781846318016
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846318597.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
The struggle to make a home in the machine-age metropolis was to find its most powerful expression in the photographs and paintings of children sleeping in the Underground, created by Bill Brandt and ...
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The struggle to make a home in the machine-age metropolis was to find its most powerful expression in the photographs and paintings of children sleeping in the Underground, created by Bill Brandt and Henry Moore during the Blitz. Chapter Five investigates how artists and writers, such as Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, made sense of the impossible spectacle under the capital. The pictures are revealed to exploit religious imagery, transforming sleeping children, who embodied national unease at the threatened erasure of the individual, into a metaphor possessing the power to transmute even the space of non-place into the cradle for a redemptive and radical future.Less
The struggle to make a home in the machine-age metropolis was to find its most powerful expression in the photographs and paintings of children sleeping in the Underground, created by Bill Brandt and Henry Moore during the Blitz. Chapter Five investigates how artists and writers, such as Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, made sense of the impossible spectacle under the capital. The pictures are revealed to exploit religious imagery, transforming sleeping children, who embodied national unease at the threatened erasure of the individual, into a metaphor possessing the power to transmute even the space of non-place into the cradle for a redemptive and radical future.