Balkan Legacies of the Great War: The Past is Never Dead

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Great War

scholarly journals “Prefer not, eh?”: Re-Scribing the Lives of the Great War Poets in Contemporary British Historical Fiction

2018 ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
María Cristina Pividori
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Great War ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Past ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Post War ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War

Although the First World War has become history by now, the memory of the war continues to be repeatedly fictionalised: retrospectively inspired narratives are often regarded as more genuine and far-reaching than historical or documentary accounts in their rendition of the past. Yet, memory is creatively selective, reflecting a highly-conflicted process of sifting and discerning what should be remembered, neglected or amplified from the stream of war experience. In his book about Pat Barker, Mark Rawlinson argues that “historical fiction has been transformed in the post-war period by the way writers have exploited the porous and unstable demarcation between fiction and no fiction, stories and history” (14). Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover (2009), Geoff Akers’s Beating for the Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg (2006) and Robert Edric’s In Zodiac Light (2008) have not become best sellers like Barker’s Regeneration trilogy; yet, they too represent the predominant commemorative drift in contemporary British fiction about the Great War. Without doubt, these three authors have followed in Barker’s steps in their purpose of holding a mirror to real people and real events in the past and of deciphering the deleted text of ‘the war to end all wars.’ However, while Barker chose to write about the often-anthologised Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dawson, Akers and Edric base their narratives on the writings, and lives, of Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney respectively. My discussion of these three novels will explore the various ways in which the past can be accessed and interpreted from the present and represented in fiction. The authors’ decisions as to what historical instances to unravel do not just reveal the relation that contemporary British fiction entertains with the Great War and with history, but also how the past erupts in the present to interrogate it. Taking three salient features of Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (1988)—intertextuality, parody and paratextuality—as my theoretical points of departure, I will explore the dominant frameworks and cultural conditions (that is the propagation of either patriotic or protest readings) within which the Great War has been narrated in the novels and the new approaches, opportunities and ethical implications of using historical and literary sources to re-scribe a previously non-existent version of the lives of the iconic Great War Poets.

Houses as Lieux de Mémoire in Margery Allingham’s Crime Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-233
Author(s):  
Renáta Zsámba
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Great War ◽  
Country House ◽  
Family Secrets ◽  
The Past ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Great War

This article discusses the house as a site of memory in the novels of Margery Allingham, where it embodies a tension between the past and the present that turns the domestic milieu into a place of horror. Stemming from Susan Rowland’s claim that Golden Age authors did not write ‘unproblematically conservative country house mysteries’ (43), this paper uses Svetlana Boym’s theory of restorative and reflective nostalgia and Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) to read Allingham’s novels, which critically observe the sustainment of a vision of the past after the Great War. In her work, country houses like the eponymous one in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), are, despite their aristocratic grandeur, perfect scenes for murder. While the countryside is associated with a nostalgic innocence, it is also contaminated by the intrusion of the present, as in Sweet Danger (1933). Family secrets are also reasons for crime, as we see in Police at the Funeral (1931). Hide My Eyes (1958) relocates the nostalgic atmosphere to a suburban house converted into a museum of ‘curios’, which operates as an ironic allegory of a nation wrapped up in its own history.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Identity ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.

scholarly journals The Great War and popular modernism: Pat Hanna's Louis XI

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-142
Author(s):  
Richard Fotheringham
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Great War ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Shell Shock ◽  
Popular Theatre ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Great War

AbstractPat Hanna's Famous Diggers, a professional vaudeville theatre troupe comprising ex-Great War Anzac soldiers (initially, mainly New Zealanders, as Hanna was himself) played for nearly two years (1923–24) at the old Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane. One item Hanna premiered at the Cremorne was Louis XI, a short (ten-minute) comic sketch he wrote himself. Modernism in the inter-war years, given its usual location within avant-garde aesthetics, high culture, internationalism and radical politics, is not — with the notable exception of Brecht's cabaret work in the 1920s — usually associated with popular theatre. While one comic playlet hardly challenges that positioning, Louis XI was a direct result of the Great War's profound reshaping of modern life. Many of the dramatised sketches performed by Hanna's company, including Louis XI, were structured around a contrast between events as they had occurred in the trenches and as they were portrayed in a utopian or dystopian fantasy, sometimes triggered by shell shock or a dream. Several, again including Louis XI, involve the past, and express the curiosity and cultural dislocation Australian- and New Zealand-born soldiers felt as they moved for the first time through real-life landscapes and architecture they had known only from popular history and romance.

Social memory and battle names: Exploring links between travel, memory and the media

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 242-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Winter
Keyword(s):  
Social Memory ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Great War ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Great War

The profile of five battles fought by Australians in the Great War (1914–1918) was traced over the past century using the frequency by which they were cited in the popular media. The pattern of these frequencies appeared to remain much the same from 1915 until the 1990s with battles involving very large numbers of casualties at Pozières and Passchendaele having a higher media frequency than smaller battles at Fromelles and Villers-Bretonneux. Gallipoli's status as Australia's best known battlefield has been consistent from 1915 until the present day. Over the past decade however, the media frequencies suggest that there has been a re-prioritization in the importance of these five battles. The discovery of lost graves at Fromelles and the introduction of a Dawn Service at Villers-Bretonneux has elevated the importance of these two sites, with the result that tourist visitation to them has also increased.

The Battle for the Irrational

2019 ◽  
pp. 36-87
Author(s):  
Renaud Gagné ◽  
For Albert Henrichs
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
Belle Epoque ◽  
Greek Religion ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Foundations ◽  
Ancient Religion ◽  
Belle Époque ◽  
The Great War

This chapter examines how the historiography of Greek religion renewed itself between 1920 and 1950. This period invested a great deal of effort in the answers that could be sought from the celebrated old sources. As the former certainties were battered from all sides, the revered voices from the past often resonated with the intensity of a battle call for renewal. Greek religion, one of the most contested domains in the reception of ancient culture, was to be solicited again and again to help imagine a new future. The chapter then considers the great changes that saw the Belle Époque study of ancient religion thoroughly transformed after the Great War, and the stakes of some of the fundamental disagreements that set influential scholars of the Interwar years against each other. Ultimately, the battle for the Greek Irrational was a search for the new foundations of modernity.

Imagining Ithaca

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Wizard Of Oz ◽  
Woody Allen ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The World ◽  
Returning Home ◽  
The Great War

‘Though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one’, said Charles Dickens, ‘stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.’ The ancient Greek word nostos, meaning homecoming or return, has a commensurate power and mystique. Irish philosopher-poet John Moriarty described it as ‘a teeming word … a haunted word … a word to conjure with’. The most celebrated and culturally enduring nostos is that of Homer’s Odysseus who spent ten years returning home after the fall of Troy. His journey back involved many obstacles, temptations, and fantastical adventures and even a katabasis, a rare descent by the living into the realm of the dead. All the while he was sustained and propelled by his memories of Ithaca (‘His native home deep imag’d in his soul’, as Pope’s translation has it). From Virgil’s Aeneid to James Joyce’s Ulysses, from MGM’s The Wizard of Oz to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and from Derek Walcott’s Omeros to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and nostalgia has been continually summoned and reimagined by writers and filmmakers. At the same time, ‘Ithaca’ has proved to be an evocative and versatile abstraction. It is as much about possibility as it is about the past; it is a vision of Arcadia or a haunting, an object of longing, a repository of memory, ‘a sleep and a forgetting’. In essence it is about seeking what is absent. Imagining Ithaca explores the idea of nostos, and its attendant pain (algos), in an excitingly eclectic range of sources: from Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, through the exilic memoirs of Nabokov and the time-travelling fantasies of Woody Allen, to Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian descent into the London Underground and Michael Portillo’s Telemachan railway journey to Salamanca. This kaleidoscopic exploration spans the end of the Great War, when the world at large was experiencing the complexities of homecoming, to the era of Brexit and COVID-19 which has put the notion of nostalgia firmly under the microscope.

scholarly journals THE CULTURAL HERITAGE AND THE MEMORY OF THE GREAT WAR IN GREAT BRITAIN. CONTEMPORARY ANGLO-SAXON HISTORIOGRAPHY

2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-35
Author(s):  
Nikolay N. Baranov ◽  
◽  
Olga S. Porshneva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
First World War ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Heritage Studies ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

The First World War is called “Great” only among the British. This circumstance underlines its enduring importance for British spiritual, political and everyday culture. The conceptualization of historical events as an act of forming cultural memory, a form of presenting a significant past and its cultural heritage is considered in this article on the basis of the methodology of memory studies and heritage studies, its new direction — critical heritage studies. Within the framework of the latter, cultural heritage is interpreted as a process of permanent rethinking and redefinition of the cultural values of the past, which includes various social actors. The influential participants in this process are researchers: culturologists, historians, literary scholars, sociologists, who not only influence collective ideas about the events of the past, but also interpret their contemporary significance. Accordingly, from a huge number of works devoted to the Great War memorialization the authors of the article focus on those that consider the interaction of various forms of memory and their influence on the evolution of the collective memory of the British; they are created in the mainstream of the historical science of culture and distinguished by a pronounced historical and anthropological approach. The article identifies several conceptual approaches in the development of the problems of the cultural heritage and the memory of the war, analyzes the achievements in a comparative study of the image of war and its evolution in the cultural memory of the British, in studying the interaction of the official and popular, collective and individual forms of war memory, general and specific features of the British and foreign traditions of memory about the First World War. It also interprets the significance of the revisionist historiography in changing the notions of the Great War heritage.

Uniforms and Commercial Culture: Constructing a Vision of Warfare in Pre-Great War Britain

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-60
Author(s):  
Christopher Leach
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Great War ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Small Wars ◽  
Anticipate Change ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Great War

Uniforms carry cultural meaning shaped by their interaction with military realities. They can communicate tradition but also anticipate change. Prior to the Great War, British Army uniforms had developed from the familiar red tunic to khaki, but the manner of their representation in the mass culture confirmed a continuity and correctness of the British way of war that ran against the emerging industrialization of warfare. Wearing familiar uniforms linked to the past and concurrently fighting what seemed like anachronistic ‘small wars’ in empire as reported in the press, what awaited the volunteers of 1914–15 could not have been anticipated by those consumers of the commercial culture. This article uses a variety of sources, from the illustrated adult and juvenile press, paintings, and toys, to reveal the link between uniforms and the representation of warfare in the fifty years prior to the Great War. In that representation we see not just the glorification of war that cultural historians attach to gendered, imperialist, or nationalist meanings. This article argues that the role of uniforms in the representation of warfare was a means by which to make it knowable and worthwhile for the consumer public. But by representing past and contemporary uniforms quite accurately, the writers and artists imposed a sense of military continuity at a time when war was changing.

Recent developments in Irish Economic History, 1850–1914

1995 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 673-678
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Guinnane
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
Economic Experience ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Basic Features ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Great War

The past 20 years have witnessed a thorough reassessment of the basic features of nineteenth-century Ireland’s economic experience. Much of this reassessment was focused on the Great Famine of the 1840s, but the post-Famine period (which means, for the purposes of this essay, from the Great Famine to the Great War) has undergone its own quieter but no less complete reassessment. The two books under review here convey the flavor of this new research.

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