King Carson: an essay on the invention of leadership

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (117) ◽  
pp. 66-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gailey
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Great War ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
English History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The Great War

For Ulster Protestants, riven by division since the fall of Terence O’Neill as prime minister of Northern Ireland in 1969, the recent troubles have seen their future steadily being conceded by default. Where there was certainty, there is now confusion; where there was once leadership, there are now only leaders. Not surprisingly, there have been wistful glances back to the mythical heroes of the past, in particular to Sir Edward Carson, who had steered them through the home rule crisis of 1912–14 to the promised land of Northern Ireland. Carson not only mobilised all Ulster Protestants, but also organised a largely successful rebellion and in time squared the circle to become one of the few rebels in English history to go on to be a law lord. Moreover, he was also a British leader, being four times in office, twice in the cabinet, and for twenty years one of the dominating figures in Tory politics. It is this duality that made Carson’s position exceptional in Anglo-Irish relations and contributed to the immense authority he periodically enjoyed. Indeed, in Ulster before the Great War his sway assumed near-charismatic proportions. Viewed as a case study in leadership, therefore, his career was, in terms of British politics, unique.

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.

scholarly journals THE SLOVAK QUESTION DURING THE GREAT WAR (A CASE STUDY OF L. ŠTUR SLOVAK-RUSSIAN SOCIETY)

Rusin ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 67-90
Author(s):  
M.V. Vedernikov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Great War ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Habsburg Empire ◽  
Separatist Movements ◽  
The Great War

With the outbreak of WWI (1914–1918), the participating countries began to promote separatist movements on their own territory, which aimed to destroy the foundations of hostile multinational empires. Of particular interest to the Russian authorities were the compatriots of the Slavic peoples of Austria-Hungary, who loudly declared their desire to destroy the Habsburg Empire. One of the most active diasporas was the Czechs, who managed to meet with Nicholas II twice in the first month of the war and achieve the formation of the Czech squad. However, the Czech question, initially incorporating the Slovak one due to the ethnic and linguistic proximity, exposed significant contradictions. An active part of the Slovak political elite living in Russia opposed the formation of a single Czech-Slovak state, because they were close to the idea of Slovakia’s accession to Russia. To popularize these ideas, a Slovak-Russian society named after L. Štur was established in Moscow. It received support from the outstanding Russians as well as the largest Slovak diasporas in the United States. The assistance of such important actors forced the Czechs to look for ways to resolve the conflict with the Slovaks, which undoubtedly led to the mainstreaming of the Slovak question. However, the cessions of 1915–1916 failed to resolve the conflict. Drawing on new archival sources and current historiography, the author concludes that the presence of multiple conflicts contributed to the formation of the Czech-Slovak national idea, which was free from asymmetry, and made Slovaks equal partners.

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.

A dog’s breakfast Brexit, 2016-18

2019 ◽  
pp. 201-224
Author(s):  
Sally Tomlinson
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
European Union ◽  
Education System ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Positive Interventions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Minority Writers

The final chapter covers a turbulent period in British politics as Parties and politicians fought to present their version of a Brexit to the British public, which remained divided by nation, class, race, age, gender and geography. Civil servants joked about the creation of an Empire 2.00, and in July 2018 Prime Minister May produced a ‘Chequers Plan’ for a ‘soft Brexit’ which caused the resignation of several ministers, who were determined on a ‘hard Brexit’ which would decisively cut the country off from a European Union. Black and other minorities had made advances in plural coexistence in a reluctant society and many younger people were learning to live together. But there were few signs that the those in charge of education were willing or able to think what a system for a more equal, globally oriented, socially and racially just education system and curriculum would look like. There is little evidence that schools or higher education have come to terms with a post-imperial role and Britain’s changed position in the world, despite positive interventions by black and minority writers, academics and students. The consequences of xenophobic and racist understandings of past decades will not be changed by teaching questionable ‘British Values’ and continuing to blame migrants and minorities for the consequences of austerity programmes. Ignorance of the past and presentation of a future where Britain is ‘Great’ again is more likely to lead to hostile nationalist sentiments and continued blaming of migrants and minorities as the country comes to terms with its waning influence on world affairs.

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.

scholarly journals The Serbian minister in London, Mateja Boskovic, the Yugoslav committee, and Serbia’s Yugoslav policy in the Great War 1914-1916

Balcanica ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 173-215
Author(s):  
Dragan Bakic
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Adriatic Sea ◽  
Close Contact ◽  
Great War ◽  
The West ◽  
Single State ◽  
Stark Contrast ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Yugoslav Committee

This paper seeks to examine the outlook of the Serbian Minister in London, Mateja Mata Boskovic, during the first half of the Great War on the South Slav (Yugoslav) question - a unification of all the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in a single state, which was Serbia?s war aim. He found himself in close contact with the members of the Yugoslav Committee, an organisation of the irredentist Yugoslav ?migr?s from Austria-Hungary in which two Croat politicians, Frano Supilo and Ante Trumbic, were leading figures. In stark contrast to other Serbian diplomats, Boskovic was not enthusiastic about Yugoslav unification. He suspected the Croat ?migr?s, especially Supilo, of pursuing exclusive Croat interests under the ruse of the Yugoslav programme. His dealings with them were made more difficult on account of the siding of a group of British ?friends of Serbia?, the most prominent of which were Robert William Seton-Watson and Henry Wickham Steed, with the Croat ?migr?s. Though not opposed in principle to an integral Yugoslav unification, Boskovic preferred staunch defence of Serbian Macedonia from Bulgarian ambitions and the acquisition of Serb-populated provinces in southern Hungary, while in the west he seems to have been content with the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, part of Slavonia and an outlet to the Adriatic Sea in Dalmatia. Finally, the reception of and reaction to Boskovic?s reports on the part of the Serbian Prime Minister, Nikola Pasic, clearly shows that the latter was determined to persist in his Yugoslav policy, despite the Treaty of London which assigned large parts of the Slovene and Croat lands to Italy and made the creation of Yugoslavia an unlikely proposition. In other words, Pasic did not vacillate between the ?small? and the ?large programme?, between Yugoslavia and Greater Serbia, as it has been often alleged in historiography and public discourse.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document