Curzio Malaparte’s War Novels in Poland: Then and Now

Author(s):  
Małgorzata Ślarzyńska
Keyword(s):  
2011 ◽  
pp. 71-98
Keyword(s):  

Worldview ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 14-22
Author(s):  
Mark Taylor

The literature of the First World War, to begin with that one, illustrates a tragic paradox: The most destructive of human enterprises can nourish the most creative. Probably no single event in history allowed the transformation of so many intense personal experiences—often presented for outspokenly didactic reasons or as cries of impotent frustration or as necessary therapy—into works of art that transcended the limited circumstances of their birth. No responsible account of this century's imaginative literature could omit Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, William Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay and A Fable, Emest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, William March's Company K, Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier: Schweik, Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grisha, or the lyric poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Charles Hamilton Sorley. To this list might be added such seminal works of modernism as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. These are not “war poems” or “war novels,“ in any narrow sense, but they clearly would not exist had there been no war.


1918 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. 381-385
Author(s):  
Albert Schinz
Keyword(s):  

1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Elizabeth C. Clark

1971 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-226
Author(s):  
Alan Henry Rose

The crucial issue facing the novelists of the pre-Civil War South was the expression of the Negro in their writings. A fine balance had to be struck between the deliberate attempt to present, as William Taylor suggests in Cavalier and Yankee (Garden City, New York, 1961), a favourable image of the slave-holding society, and the subjective impulse to express the powerful forces of racial destruction that were covert in the ante-bellum South. Such a balance rarely occurred. Rather, as social tensions increased with the approach of the Civil War, the writers retreated from their confrontation with the image of the Negro. Kenneth Lynn, in Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston, 1959), shows a progression which finds the authors using increasingly younger narrators, which Lynn feels absolves them of the responsibility of maturely facing the issues. But the novels of John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms reveal rather different forms of evasion. Kennedy, the more didactic writer, as the war approached, increasingly removed his novels from the present. This simply relieved him of the obligation of expressing concretely documented reality, and allowed a shift into fantasy. The image of the Negro could be safely excluded from such a context. However, fantasy is, if anything, a more congenial environment for the expression of covert social forces. Thus, a curious irony occurs in Kennedy's later novels. The image of the Negro disappears from works such as Rob of the Bowl (1838), but the forces of demonic malevolence with which he is associated are transferred to the figure which replaces him, the indentured Indian. A racial equation emerges, and in this chiaroscuric world of night and fire the Indian offers a glimpse of the malevolence suppressed in the image of the Negro.


Extrapolation ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 345-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Hoskinson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  

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.


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