Louis MacNeice and the Second World War

2012 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
Terence Brown
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Louis Macneice ◽  
Second World

Bombed Churches

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Advisory Committee ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Church Architecture ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
World War ◽  
Louis Macneice ◽  
Arts Festival ◽  
Second World

More often than not, the blitz was represented by bombed churches. Images of St Paul’s Cathedral soaring above smoke and, in a more tragic key, the ruins of St Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry encapsulate the values that Britons thought they were fighting for in the Second World War. John Piper, Cecil Beaton, Hanslip Fletcher, and other visual artists, many of them employed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), expressed their ideas about British heritage through paintings, drawings, and photographs of church architecture. At the same time, writers such as Virginia Woolf, John Strachey, John Betjeman, and Louis MacNeice modulated their patriotism—with quibbles and caveats—into ‘a faith to fight for’. Drawing on poetry, novels, tracts, newspaper articles, and visual culture, this chapter demonstrates the propagandistic value of bombed churches during the Second World War, then flashes forward to the consecration of the rebuilt cathedral in Coventry, which opened with great fanfare and an arts festival in May 1962.

Writing the Radio War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Whittington
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Identity ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Louis Macneice ◽  
Imperial Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Compromise ◽  
To Come ◽  
Second World

Writing the Radio War positions the Second World War as a critical moment in the history of cultural mediation in Britain. Through chapters focusing on the ‘broadbrow’ radicalism of J.B. Priestley, ground-breaking works by Louis MacNeice and James Hanley at the BBC Features Department, frontline reporting by Denis Johnston, and the emergence of a West Indian literary identity in the broadcasts of Una Marson, Writing the Radio War explores how these writers capitalized on the particularities of the sonic medium to communicate their visions of wartime and postwar Britain and its empire. By combining literary aesthetics with the acoustics of space, accent, and dialect, writers created aural communities that at times converged, and at times contended, with official wartime versions of Britain and Britishness. Though rarely controversial, the broadcasts of these writers navigated an environment of political compromise in order to present new articulations of British and imperial identity that set the stage for the postwar multi-ethnic welfare state to come.

scholarly journals Archaeologies of Sound: Reconstructing Louis MacNeice's Wartime Radio Publics

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Whittington
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
Public Activity ◽  
Good Citizenship ◽  
Louis Macneice ◽  
Audience Responses ◽  
Second World

Attempts to recover the audible experience of the Second World War are often frustrated by the paradox that the acoustic past is available in theory but elusive in practice. Focusing on the archival traces left by poet and broadcaster Louis MacNeice, this paper considers how scholars might reconstruct past radio publics – affiliative and critical communities of listening – from a partial record. As one of the most prominent and celebrated scriptwriters at the wartime BBC, MacNeice played a major role in shaping the British public's sense of itself and of the war. For MacNeice, good listening was good citizenship: in two major works, Alexander Nevsky (1941) and Christopher Columbus (1942), he uses aurally astute characters and layered acoustic spaces to model the process of navigating the crowded soundscapes of war. The plays build auditory worlds that mediate between the poles of hearing as a subjective, interior practice and listening as a public activity with political resonances. Through a close examination of scripts, recordings, production notes, and audience responses relating to these two plays, this paper traces the outline of the absent experience of listening in order to better understand the wartime British radio public.

Gender and the Second World War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinna Peniston-Bird ◽  
Emma Vickers
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World

Kapitalistische Krisen mit und ohne systemischer Herausforderung.

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (185) ◽  
pp. 543-560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingo Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
World Market ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Deep Penetration ◽  
World War ◽  
Major Overhaul ◽  
Domestic Markets ◽  
Global Restructuring ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Class Power ◽  
Second World

This article draws on Marxist theories of crises, imperialism, and class formation to identify commonalities and differences between the stagnation of the 1930s and today. Its key argument is that the anti-systemic movements that existed in the 1930s and gained ground after the Second World War pushed capitalists to turn from imperialist expansion and rivalry to the deep penetration of domestic markets. By doing so they unleashed strong economic growth that allowed for social compromise without hurting profits. Yet, once labour and other social movements threatened to shift the balance of class power into their favor, capitalist counter-reform began. In its course, global restructuring, and notably the integration of Russia and China into the world market, created space for accumulation. The cause for the current stagnation is that this space has been used up. In the absence of systemic challenges capitalists have little reason to seek a major overhaul of their accumulation strategies that could help to overcome stagnation. Instead they prop up profits at the expense of the subaltern classes even if this prolongs stagnation and leads to sharper social divisions.

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