‘Witness Literature’ in the Post-war Novels of Storm Jameson and Doris Lessing

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Maslen
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Ms. Shikha Sharma

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Laureate (1919-2007), a British novelist, poet, a writer of epic scope, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. She was the “most fearless woman novelist in the world, unabashed ex-communist and uncompromising feminist”. Doris has earned the great reputation as a distinguished and outstanding writer. She raised local and private problems of England in post-war period with emphasis on man-woman relationship, feminist movement, welfare state, socio-economic and political ethos, population explosion, terrorism and social conflicts in her novels.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Taras Hrosevych

The general regularities and main tendencies of the development of a war novel have been researched in the article, an attempt of its typology and periodization is realized, the most common genre models is identified. The novel about the Second World War as a leading epic genre, which develops the theme of war in literature, creatively synthesized all the experience gained by the writers and front-line soldiers, became a noticeable artistic phenomenon and widespread genre formation in Western European, American and Slavic writing. It is concluded that the aesthetic and ideological-thematic level of artistic modeling of war reality is localized in different national literatures unevenly and stipulated first of all for the historical and geopolitical scope of the involvement of warring countries in hostilities. For example, in German military romance, is the so-called "Remarkable" novel, as well as a novel with a marked anti-militaristic nature. The main plot of the French war novel is the resistance movement, while the Italian one is fascist domination and occupation actions in the Balkans. Instead, in Britain, which has escaped occupation, military creativity takes a rather modest place. American writing focuses on war as a social phenomenon, armed conflicts in Vietnam. The polivector artistic search, the richness of types and varieties of war novel (panoramic novel, lyric war novel, anti-fascist novel, soldier novel, war novel-education, war novel with documentary basis, etc.) demonstrates military novel prose of Eastern Slavs. In particular, in the development of the Ukrainian war novel, literary critics distinguish such branches as the war novel, the post-war novel of the first decade, the war novel prose of the "second wave" (etc. pol. 50's - 60's), war novel 70’s-80’s, as well as modern war novels.


The death of Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing sparked a range of commemorations that cemented her place as one of the major figures of twentieth- and twenty-first- century world literature. This volume views Lessing’s writing as a whole and in retrospect, focusing on her innovative attempts to rework literary form to engage with the challenges thrown up by the sweeping historical changes through which she lived. Contributors provide new readings of Lessing’s work via contexts ranging from post-war youth politics and radical women’s writing to European cinema, analyse her experiments with genres from realism to autobiography and science-fiction, and draw on previously unstudied archive material. The volume also explores how Lessing’s writing can provide insight into some of the issues now shaping twenty-first century scholarship – including trauma, ecocriticism, the post-human, and world literature – as they emerge as defining challenges to our own present moment in history.


2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Siepmann

This study is an exploratory investigation into lexico-grammatical items specific to a large corpus of English-language post-war novels, as compared to corpora of conversation, news and academic English. Its overall aim is threefold: first, to show how the subjective impression of ‘literariness’ arising from fictional works is at least partly based on the statistically significant use of highly specific words and lexico-grammatical configurations; second, to attempt a broad classification of key words and patterns; third, to illustrate the fiction-specific patterns formed by three key words. Analysis proceeded in three steps. First, a key word analysis was performed. In the second step, all two-to-five word strings contained in the English corpus were generated. In the third step, multi-word strings, collocations and colligations associated with three English key words (‘thought’, ‘sun’ and ‘jerk’) were analysed. Results indicate that post-war fiction is characterized by the dense use of specific sets of key words and key patterns, such as multi-word strings (must have been), phrase frames (like a + NP, there was a + NP) colligations (PossDet thoughts were on NP), collocations (the strengthening sun) and lexically specific narrative patterns (PossDet thoughts were interrupted when/as + time clause). The patterns in question are shown to be interconnected through a complex web of analogical creations. Implications are discussed for theories of literature, lexicology and translation.


Author(s):  
Maroula Joannou

Mary Joannou examines the place of London as a haven for English-speaking exiles and émigrés and questions the extent to which it is possible to separate English literature from the literature of the rest of the world as post-war globalization destabilized, de-territorialized and de-colonized Englishness. For the five migrant women writers addressed here - Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, and Kamala Markandaya – the attractions of migration to London, albeit bomb-damaged and shortage riven after the war, far outweighed the drabness of the environment of the metropolis. The new migrants, all politically on the left and strong upholders of freedom of speech and universal human rights, made a significant contribution to the enrichment and expansion of Britain’s literary culture in the 1940s and 1950s which was well-served by thriving post-war publishing and media industries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-175
Author(s):  
E. E. Ivanov

The article discusses sleep as an anarrative author’s strategy. The special role of this motif in the writer’s metaromaniac cycle is indicated by its presence in strong positions of the text (“Evening at Claire’s”, “The Ghost of Alexander Wolf”, “Awakening”) and the generalization of the theme of sleep in works with stories about the Civil War and post-war emigration (“The Prisoner”, “Return of the Buddha”). Anarrative elements that undermine the evidence of events are described as a system of opposing the current state of affairs of eternity. In this connection, in the first novel by G. Gazdanov, an incomplete “love triangle” is analyzed – the absence of Claire’s husband as a motivated witness to the reliability of the narrative, “errors” in the sequence of events, as well as a number of strange, mysterious words and expressions. Anarrativity allows us to separate the world of becoming a narrator and the metaphysical world of the author-creator. As a result of the structural-typological analysis, a distinction is made between the concepts of “pre-incarnation” and “rebirth” in the writer's thesaurus. The first forms a narrative model of “catching” in the world of illusions, and it is connected with the outlook of the heroes who have lost their native soil and are trying to overcome de- pendence on external circumstances. Second, “rebirth” refers to the “outside” position of the author-creator, which is attributed to the penetration of anarrative elements in novels with traces of experience of participation in war. In later texts, anarrativity flows into narration, and the author’s voice does not create dissonance in the discourse of G. Gazdanov’s dominant themes: “contemplation”, “randomness of the nonrandom”, the neighborhood of “life” and “death”, each of which intersects with the idea of a dream existence. Being a universal, sleep (a state akin to hypnosis) turns out to be the ultimate form of contingency, a fatal trap of the loss of selfhood, on the one hand, on the other, as a dream, it can be a mode of creative transformation of the world. As an alternative to this opposition, there is a mode of existence beyond the extremes of the thoughtless (mainly, these are the images of officers in “Evening at Claire’s” and “The Prisoner”) or intellectually exalted (narrators in post-war novels) ways of life, demonstrated in the active manifestation of altruism and compassion of the “average Frenchman” Pierre (“Awakening”).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Susan Armour

<p>Since the publication of his first novel, The Big Season, in 1962, Maurice Gee’s fiction for adults has been noted for its preoccupation with violence. But can we say the same of his fiction for children? And if so, how might that predisposition be reconciled for young readers? Using a predominantly literary-historical reading of Gee’s fiction for children published between 1986 and 1999, this thesis attempts to answer these questions. Chapter 1 establishes the impact of violence on Gee’s early years and its likely influence on his writing. Chapters 2-4 then consider the presence of violence in Gee’s five historical novels for children. Chapter 2 focuses on the wartime novels, The Fire-Raiser and The Champion, and their respective depictions of war and racism, while chapter 3 explores individual, family and social violence as “expanding scenes of violence” (Heim 25) in The Fat Man. The fourth and final chapter discusses the two post-war novels, Orchard Street and Hostel Girl, where social violence runs as an undercurrent of everyday life. The thesis finds that violence – in different forms and at different intensities – persists across the novels and that Gee tempers its presence appropriately for his young readers. Violence, Gee seems to be saying, is part of the mixed nature of the human condition and this knowledge should not be denied children.</p>


Author(s):  
Gavin Miller

Existential-humanistic psychology recovers neglected philosophical and spiritual categories regarded as proper to human being, in contrast with animal life or inanimate systems. Existential-humanistic proto-discourses are important to Vincent McHugh’s I Am Thinking of My Darling (1943), in which an emerging ideal of personal authenticity queries the American Dream in 1940s’ New York. McHugh’s critical utopia contrasts with the ponderous extrapolations of Colin Wilson in The Mind Parasites (1967) and The Space Vampires (1976), and Doris Lessing in The Four-Gated City (1969). Both these authors – despite their widely differing positions in the literary canon – use science fiction as a didactic and futurological (even prophetic) medium in which existential psychology serves as the supposed rationale for spiritual apotheosis (including the cultivation of psi powers). A more fruitful post-war deployment of existential-humanistic psychology can be found in texts such as Theodore Sturgeon’s ‘And Now the News …’ (1956), Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which critique the instrumental tendencies of mainstream psychology.


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