Fiction during the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Feigel
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Rose Macaulay ◽  
First World ◽  
Wartime Experience

This chapter focuses on home front literature and concentrates particularly on literature portraying the wartime experience in London. The majority of war literature was produced by authors who had remained in London. These tended to be non-combatants, but played an often major role in the ARP (Air Raid Protection) services, defending their city. Henry Green, William Sansom, and Stephen Spender worked as firemen; Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene as ARP wardens; and Rose Macaulay as an ambulance driver. This was a community of writers who were facing danger and defending their city, rather like the soldier poets in the trenches in the First World War. These authors had direct experience of the various periods of bombing, as well as of the peculiar hiatus when the war carried on elsewhere.

Registrations

2021 ◽  
pp. 74-118
Author(s):  
Rex Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Home Front ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Identity Card ◽  
Identity Cards ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

From the beginning of the Second World War until 1952, the UK maintained a National Register and issued all citizens with identity cards (one of only two times in which this has occurred—the other being during the First World War). The National Registration Identity Card was an intrinsic part of the logic of classification which guided life on the home front and organized individuals into categories of usefulness, vulnerability, and risk. Mirroring the simplistic basis of these categories, the National Registration Identity Card was notable for the paucity of information it contained. Rather than working as an authentic token which served to validate identity in itself, when it came to security, the card only really worked when read alongside the more richly detailed register to which it referred. Cross-checking between card and register and, more importantly, opening conversations which rested upon the potential for cross-checking, thus animated attempts to identity individuals in wartime Britain. In retreating from the radical subjectivity of modernist prose, writers of the period, such as Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, produced characterizations that were as similarly shorn of depth as the categories that the home front pushed individuals into and the cards that identified them. In playing upon the genre of the espionage thriller, The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The Heat of the Day (1948) thus narrate identities that are defined by social position and by plots which confirm individuals as often precisely what they initially appear to be.

The Motif of Sacrifice in the Literature and Culture of the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Rawlinson
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

This chapter explores how Anglophone literature and culture envisioned and questioned an economy of sacrificial exchange, particularly its symbolic aspect, as driving the compulsions entangled in the Second World War. After considering how Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories cast light on the Home Front rhetorics of sacrifice and reconstruction, it looks at how poets Robert Graves, Keith Douglas, and Alun Lewis reflect on First World War poetry of sacrifice. With reference to René Girard’s and Carl von Clausewitz’s writings on war, I take up Elaine Cobley’s assertion about the differing valencies of the First and Second World Wars, arguing that the contrast is better seen in terms of sacrificial economy. I develop that argument with reference to examples from Second World War literature depicting sacrificial exchange (while often harking back to the First World War), including Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61), and William Wharton’s memoir Shrapnel (2012).

III Woolton at the Ministry of Food

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-70
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Food Control ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

The Ministry of Food was essentially created during the War, and survived until it was reabsorbed into the Ministry of Agriculture in 1958. It has been the subject of extensive popular and scholarly interest as part of research into the management of the Second World War on the Home Front. Lessons about food control had been learned from the experiences of the First World War, which were consciously applied to this war. This was in part because so many of the men had been involved in that conflict in some way, including Woolton himself. They had personal memories of what had worked well then, but were also very aware of the mistakes that had been made, which they did not wanted repeated. Woolton certainly was, as his ...

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Beryl Pong
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

The introduction examines how writers anticipated the Second World War in the interwar period, and why dread became a pervasive experience in the 1930s and 1940s. Beginning with the problem of how to define the spatio-temporal boundaries of modern wartime, it argues that, with war looming, modernist time philosophy gradually shifted focus from the past to the future. The chapter then presents a model for understanding Second World Wartime through the concept of late modernist chronophobia. As a war understood to be a repetition of the First World War, but whose effects were expected to be more catastrophic and total, it is characterized by a fear of time itself. During the Blitz, this is enacted on a local level on the home front, through the temporalities of aerial bombardment. The chapter discusses why, as a bridge between the memory of the First World War and the incipient temporalities of the Cold War, the Second World War is crucial to understanding how modern wartime developed in the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Cast Down, But Not Forsaken

2018 ◽  
Vol 106 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Elliot Worsfold
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Hyphenated Identity ◽  
English Canadian ◽  
War Commemoration ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
Wartime Experience

This study seeks to reassess the notion that German-Canadians in Ontario were “silent victims” during the Second World War by exploring the wartime experience and memory of German-Canadian Lutheran congregations in Oxford and Waterloo Counties. Far from silent, Lutheran pastors initiated several strategies to ensure their congregants did not face discrimination and internment as they had during the First World War. These strategies encompassed several reforms, including eliminating German language church services and embracing English-Canadian symbols and forms of post-war commemoration. However, these reforms were often met with resistance and ambivalence by their congregations, thereby creating a conversation within the German-Canadian Lutheran community on how to reconcile its Germanic and Lutheran heritage with waging a patriotic war. While previous studies have primarily focused on identity loss, this study suggests that the debates that occurred within these Lutheran churches were representative of the community’s German-Canadian hyphenated identity.

Western Ethnic Borderlands in the Influence of Russian-Soviet Propagangda Before and in the Years of the Second World War

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (46) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
Igor Lyubchyk
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
Russian Identity

The research issue peculiarities of wide Russian propaganda among the most Western ethnographic group – Lemkies is revealed in the article. The character and orientation of Russian and Soviet agitation through the social, religious and social movements aimed at supporting Russian identity in the region are traced. Tragic pages during the First World War were Thalrogian prisons for Lemkas, which actually swept Lemkivshchyna through Muscovophilian influences. Agitation for Russian Orthodoxy has provoked frequent cases of sharp conflicts between Lemkas. In general, attempts by moskvophile agitators to impose russian identity on the Orthodox rite were failed. Taking advantage of the complex socio-economic situation of Lemkos, Russian campaigners began to promote moving to the USSR. Another stage of Russian propaganda among Lemkos began with the onset of the Second World War. Throughout the territory of the Galician Lemkivshchyna, Soviet propaganda for resettlement to the USSR began rather quickly. During the dramatic events of the Second World War and the post-war period, despite the outbreaks of the liberation movement, among the Lemkoswere manifestations of political sympathies oriented toward the USSR. Keywords: borderlands, Lemkivshchyna, Lemky, Lemkivsky schism, Moskvophile, Orthodoxy, agitation, ethnopolitics

Blockade and the Civilian Population

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip Drew
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
World War ◽  
Civilian Population ◽  
Strategic Bombing ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

Drawing on several examples through history, this chapter illustrates the devastating potential that maritime blockades can have when they are employed against modern societies that are dependent on maritime trade, and particularly on the importation of foodstuffs and agricutltural materials for the survival of their civilian populations. Revealing statistics that show that the blockade of Germany during the First World War caused more civilian deaths than did the allied strategic bombing campaign of the Second World War, and that the sanctions regime against Iraq killed far more people than did the 1991 Gulf War, it demonstrates that civilian casualties are often the true unseen cost of conducting blockade operations.

scholarly journals Will the World’s Glass after the Coronavirus Pandemic Be Half-Empty or Half-Full?

Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-281
Author(s):  
Dubravka Stojanović
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Great Crash ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

AbstractThe author comments on the political and economic options in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic that started at the beginning of 2020. She revisits responses to the crises of the First World War, the Great Crash of 1929, and the Second World War, sorting them into ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ responses, and outlining their respective consequences.

The First Wave of International War Crimes Trials: Istanbul and Leipzig

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN KRAMER
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
International War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
Foundation Stone

The Nuremberg tribunal following the Second World War is universally considered as the foundation stone of international law with regard to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It may come as a surprise, however, to learn that the first international attempts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity came at the end of the First World War, with trials held at Allied prompting in Turkey and Germany.

Bernard Hart (1879–1966) and his influence on British psychiatry

2021 ◽  
pp. 096777202110440
Author(s):  
Jonathan R.T. Davidson ◽  
Roger Hart
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
College Hospital ◽  
War Neurosis ◽  
The First World War ◽  
University College ◽  
Sound Mind ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
Medical Qualification

Bernard Hart was among the most eminent 20th-century British psychiatrists. Following medical qualification at University College Hospital, London, he trained in psychiatry, which included two years studying in Paris and Zurich. He was appointed as the first psychiatric consultant at University College Hospital, then spent some time in Liverpool, where he specialized in treating war neurosis. Early in his career, Hart was one of the first to introduce the ideas of Freud and Janet, and the importance of unconscious processes, to the British public. After the First World War, Hart returned to University College Hospital, where he remained until 1947, building up a flourishing department. Hart was appointed to numerous senior offices and directed the psychiatric section of the British Emergency Medical Services in the Second World War. Hart is believed to be the last psychiatrist to certify someone (John Amery) as being of sufficiently sound mind to die for treason.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document