Search Results

Toward an Epistemology of Citation: “Air War and Literature”

Carol Jacobs

in Sebald'S Vision

This is a reading of Sebald's “Air War and Literature” that questions our ability to move from observation to realistic representation.

Education and Catastrophe Education and Catastrophe The War and the World

Simon J. James

in Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture

In spite of its meliorist tendencies, Wells’s work also contains a strongly pessimistic strain, and frequently stages scenes of warfare and violent destruction. The War in the Air predicts an aerial ... More

In spite of its meliorist tendencies, Wells’s work also contains a strongly pessimistic strain, and frequently stages scenes of warfare and violent destruction. The War in the Air predicts an aerial war with Germany, and once the Great War actually came to pass, Wells became even more convinced that the world had to adopt his ideas, or civilization would perish. The creation of a world state would end warfare between nation states, and after the First World War Wells campaigned for the teaching in schools of the universal teaching of humanity’s common origin over national histories; and he co-wrote the textbooks that would establish a global commonwealth. Seeking a larger audience still, Wells also collaborated on the film Things to Come, a future history that sees utopia arising after a destructive World War.Less

PROLOGUE

Vincent Sherry

in The Great War and the Language of Modernism

The Prologue presents the need for a historically informed reading of the modernist literature prompted by the Great War of 1914-1918. The prominence of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory ... More

The Prologue presents the need for a historically informed reading of the modernist literature prompted by the Great War of 1914-1918. The prominence of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory has allowed critical attention to be focused on the combat writing of the war. But the proper contemporary context for reading and understanding the modernist literature of the war, which was prompted by the civilian circumstances of urban London and the policy documents of the partisan Liberal press, has still to be reconstructed. This work of historical reconstruction and critical analysis is the major project of The Great War and the Language of Modernism.Less

Their Country, Our Culture: The Persistence of the Cold War

Steven Belletto

in No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives

Chapter six argues that many of the themes and concerns that preoccupied thinkers during the Cold War persist after 1989, a persistence that it visible both in the ways the conflict is explicitly ... More

Chapter six argues that many of the themes and concerns that preoccupied thinkers during the Cold War persist after 1989, a persistence that it visible both in the ways the conflict is explicitly thematized, and in the ways that chance is tied to the sorts of narrative concerns animated by the Cold War. It begins with a discussion of Paul Auster’s writing, which is concerned with questions of chance and coincidence. By reading Auster in light of the preceding chapters, it becomes clear that his preoccupation with chance and his metafictional tendencies are related. From Auster’s writing, the chapter analyzes Chang-Rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker (1995), which brings tropes of accident and espionage into the present in order to analyze causal systems underwritten by the Cold War. The chapter ends with a look at My Life in CIA (2005), by Harry Mathews, a long-time expatriate and the only American member of the French avant-garde literary group, Oulipo. I show how the book turns on questions of chance and coincidence to show, in retrospect, their thematization was of a piece with the fabric of Cold War logic.Less

The Sensational War

Alice Fahs

in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865

This chapter focuses on sensational wartime literature. Sensational literature stressed the romance, excitement, and adventure of war. Sensational novels occupied a particular niche in commercial ... More

This chapter focuses on sensational wartime literature. Sensational literature stressed the romance, excitement, and adventure of war. Sensational novels occupied a particular niche in commercial literary culture in wartime, distinguished from other popular literature by a set of conventions including price, physical appearance, subject matter, and distribution. They emphasized bold action, striking effects on the emotions, sharply drawn heroes and villains, and highly conventionalized, florid, even lurid language.Less

A Boys' and Girls' War

Alice Fahs

in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865

This chapter focuses on war literature for children in the North. Titles such as Charles Carleton Coffin's My Days and Nights on the Battlefield and Oliver Optic's The Sailor Boy and The Soldier Boy ... More

This chapter focuses on war literature for children in the North. Titles such as Charles Carleton Coffin's My Days and Nights on the Battlefield and Oliver Optic's The Sailor Boy and The Soldier Boy were an important part of a burgeoning juvenile war literature that, from 1863 to the end of the war, marked an emerging wartime shift in the imagined relationship between child, family, and nation.Less

Conclusion

Debbie Pinfold

in The Child’s View of the Third Reich in German Literature: The Eye Among the Blind

This chapter considers the extent in which the German preoccupation with the child is embedded in the deeper artistic and moral concerns of post-war German literature. The interest in the childlike ... More

This chapter considers the extent in which the German preoccupation with the child is embedded in the deeper artistic and moral concerns of post-war German literature. The interest in the childlike can be explained by the association between the artist and the child, for the child is symbolic of the artistic tenor of the post-war era just as it is of the Romantic period. The childlike element in modern German literature is important in a very broad sense, for if the reassertion of the positive myth of childhood reaffirms the German belief in the artist, then the dominance of the childlike in literature reasserts the belief in culture as a means of preserving human values. At a time of rapid social and political change the child is a perfect vehicle for suggesting openness to change while also representing certain constants of human existence and indeed of cultural and literary values.Less

Introduction

Alice Fahs

in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the imaginative dimensions of shared Northern and Southern literary sensibilities by examining several themes and genres of ... More

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the imaginative dimensions of shared Northern and Southern literary sensibilities by examining several themes and genres of popular war literature. It does not argue that there was a unified “American mind” discernible in popular war literature or a unified “American imagination”—both modes of approaching literature that are artifacts of an older, consensus-oriented school of American studies. But the chapter does recognize that there was a set of shared rhetorics in popular war literature and argues that it is crucial to understand how Northern and Southern popular literary cultures were alike in order to understand their differences.Less

Popular Literary Culture in Wartime

Alice Fahs

in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865

This chapter discusses the impact of war on popular literary culture. War changed what people read, what was available to read, and how, where, and with what expectations they read it. It altered the ... More

This chapter discusses the impact of war on popular literary culture. War changed what people read, what was available to read, and how, where, and with what expectations they read it. It altered the plans and prospects of publishers, pushing some to the brink of failure while giving new energy to a few well-positioned firms. War reshaped literary careers, forcing established authors to reconsider their writing plans, inspiring new authors to enter the literary marketplace, and deeply affecting what both found possible to imagine. Most profoundly, it catalyzed a rethinking of prevailing beliefs about the connecting links between literature and society, and between individual and nation. Both north and south, war became not just an obsessive, all-consuming subject but also a mode of perception and way of life that disrupted and reorganized authors' and readers' conceptions of identity, nationhood, and even time itself.Less

Anti-War?: Notes on a Ghostly Concept

Giorgio Mariani

in Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature

This chapter discusses the ghostly nature of anti-war literature. Even though anti-war literature remains until now largely untheorized, the label continues to be employed and to complicate most ... More

This chapter discusses the ghostly nature of anti-war literature. Even though anti-war literature remains until now largely untheorized, the label continues to be employed and to complicate most discussions of both war literature and war cinema. This is evident in countless Western narratives dealing with war—Homer's Iliad, William Shakespeare's history plays, Leo Tolstoi's War and Peace, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, just to name a few examples. This chapter considers the incorporeal notions associated with the anti-war concept by looking at two texts: Kate McLoughlin's Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq and Cynthia Wachtell's War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861–1914. It argues that war novels should always be read also as war-and-peace novels and concludes with two examples of American literature that are unquestionably anti-war: Mark Twain's “War Prayer” and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.Less

Accidents Going Somewhere to Happen: African-American Self-Definition at Mid-Century

Steven Belletto

in No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives

Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, ... More

Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), to less frequently discussed works such as Wright’s own second novel, The Outsider (1953), and John A. Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am! (1967). The chapter demonstrates how African Americans writers dramatized a sense of being caught between the competing systems of control represented by Communism on the one hand, and the promise of American democratic freedom on the other. Tracing an arc from Native Son to The Man Who Cried I Am!, the chapter demonstrates the ever-changing relationship between the individual and political rhetoric by showing how the denial of chance was first attributed to Communists, who in Invisible Man simply want to control African Americans for their own purposes, and then moves finally The Man Who Cried I Am!, which shows that, from a black perspective, American democracy masks a fantasy of complete control.Less

Afterword

Syrine Hout

in Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora

The Afterword sums up the permutations of homeness found in these examples of post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature. The connotative range of ‘home’ is wide, extending from the most private and ... More

The Afterword sums up the permutations of homeness found in these examples of post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature. The connotative range of ‘home’ is wide, extending from the most private and concrete to the large and possibly elusive, metaphorical, and idealist. It also raises, and tries to answer, the question about the future of this new foreign-language variant of contemporary Lebanese literature which seems so far to be still steeped in the memories of war(s). The unfinished trauma of this harrowing experience for those who do remember, however little that may be, has predictably been showing its narratological symptoms in the post-war, here synonymous with the post-traumatic, phase. By expressing what has been silenced and repressed, the Anglophone literary constructions of the selected authors' generation-based experiences amount to testimonies that will be required to achieve so much as an outline of Lebanon's possible futures.Less

The Feminized War

Alice Fahs

in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865

This chapter focuses on stories and vignettes on the role of women in the war effort. Articles, illustrations, and stories emphasized the importance of women's domestic labor for the war effort, ... More

This chapter focuses on stories and vignettes on the role of women in the war effort. Articles, illustrations, and stories emphasized the importance of women's domestic labor for the war effort, whether in preparing and packing provisions, sewing uniforms and havelocks, or knitting socks and mittens for soldiers. Other writings stressed the central importance of women in supporting men's enlistment, at times explicitly drawing parallels to the actions of Revolutionary mothers.Less

The Reality of War and the War Experience of Russian Soldiers on the Russian Western Front, 1914–1915

Igor Narskij

in The Forgotten Front: The Eastern Theater of World War I, 1914 - 1915

Arguing that the war in the east has been overshadowed in public remembrance by literary depictions of the war on the western front, Eva Horn delves into novelistic portrayals of the eastern front. ... More

Arguing that the war in the east has been overshadowed in public remembrance by literary depictions of the war on the western front, Eva Horn delves into novelistic portrayals of the eastern front. The chapter finds that, in contrast to the traumatic technologized trench warfare of the west, the “wild war” on the eastern front was “not a war of machines but a war of bodies and mentalities, not a war of nations but of ethnicities, not a war of destruction from a distance but a dirty, destructive interaction between enemies.”Less

Introduction

Andrew Frayn

in Writing disenchantment: British First World War prose, 1914-30

The introduction sets forth a genealogy of disenchantment, from mid and late nineteenth-century fears of degeneration as a consequence of anthropological work, anxieties about increasing ... More

The introduction sets forth a genealogy of disenchantment, from mid and late nineteenth-century fears of degeneration as a consequence of anthropological work, anxieties about increasing mechanisation and the concomitant growth of mass culture. The ways in which the theories of social reformers such as C. F. G. Masterman and declinists such as Oswald Spengler prefigure and inform First World War literature are outlined. The increasing predominance of mass culture, in line with improvements in literacy, meant that the novel was becoming the form in which matters of note were discussed, and writers’ views on writing are mobilised to support this analysis. Typically British pre-war enchantments are sketched out, and the book is situated within the current field of First World War Studies. A chapter outline is provided.Less

Introduction Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Roots and Routes

Syrine Hout

in Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora

The introductory chapter is divided into two sections: the first one, focusing on roots, is a review of Arabic-language Lebanese war literature of the 1970s and 1980s, its main authors, and trends, ... More

The introductory chapter is divided into two sections: the first one, focusing on roots, is a review of Arabic-language Lebanese war literature of the 1970s and 1980s, its main authors, and trends, with some references to Francophone Lebanese literature; the second one, focusing on routes, is an overview of post-war Anglophone literature as a phenomenon of the last fourteen years. It explains why and how, emerging a few years after peace had been achieved in Lebanon in 1990, these narratives display a newer version of ‘survivor memory’, as defined by Marianne Hirsch, in the form of a generation-specific consciousness, one alternatively replete with irony, parody, nostalgia, and critiques of self and nation. It focuses on the cross-cultural aspect of these texts in two ways: on these authors' views on writing in a foreign language; and on several critics' observations on the increased diversification of Lebanese literature. Drawing on theories of transnational literatures, it argues that these novels characterise a new literary and cultural phenomenon, and have founded what is predicted to become a fuller-fledged branch of Lebanese diasporic literature. By questioning home from a spatial and a temporal distance, these texts offer different visions of ‘Lebaneseness’ in the twenty-first century.Less

‘Sollten Alle Kinder Dichter Sein?’: 1 The Child as Artist

Debbie Pinfold

in The Child’s View of the Third Reich in German Literature: The Eye Among the Blind

Exploring the child as a symbol for the artist in post-war literature is the main concern of this chapter. It highlights the fact that the two principal modern myths of childhood, its innocence and ... More

Exploring the child as a symbol for the artist in post-war literature is the main concern of this chapter. It highlights the fact that the two principal modern myths of childhood, its innocence and its artistry, are not mutually dependent. It also illustrates that in the 20th century, the myth of the child as artist and conversely the artist as child has flourished. In the works examined in this chapter, children play a dual role: on the realistic level, they can appear as traumatized victims of the Third Reich, but the fact that they may have been psychologically damaged does not prevent them representing the artist or at least his potential if this is the only way for writers to suggest some glimmer of hope in a morally bankrupt country, while on a narrative focus, it represents a clarity and integrity of vision which will become those of the artist.Less

The Sentimental Soldier

Alice Fahs

in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865

This chapter focuses on sentimental stories and songs, which focused on the individual experiences of the ordinary soldier on the battlefield and in the hospital. Even as the mass movements of armies ... More

This chapter focuses on sentimental stories and songs, which focused on the individual experiences of the ordinary soldier on the battlefield and in the hospital. Even as the mass movements of armies increasingly defined the war and the outcome of battle was increasingly mass slaughter, sentimental literature persistently singled out the individual soldier as an icon of heroism. This popular insistence on the individual, personal meanings of the war was far more prevalent than usually recognized, and militated against developing ideas of the war as new forms of system and organization in American life.Less