scholarly journals Fiction and Trauma from the Second World War to 9/11

Author(s):  
Paul Crosthwaite

This chapter looks at how contemporary British and Irish novelists reflect on the spasms of catastrophic violence that have punctuated the twentieth century and continue to define the twenty-first. These events not only traumatized individuals on a mass scale, but also dealt irrevocable damage to foundational assumptions concerning reason, progress, meaning, and language. Such weighty preoccupations, however, took some time to fully coalesce in the fiction of the post-Second World War period. There were few substantial treatments of the war in its immediate aftermath. When such responses began to appear in the 1950s, and swelled in number in the 1960s, they did so predominantly in the form of conventional social realist narratives concerned with the immediate experience of combat and the impact of the conflict on the structures of British and Irish society.


2018 ◽  
pp. 162-182
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin

This chapter focuses on the LVA’s efforts to engage with Irish women in Liverpool during the Second World War and post-war years. Despite a reduction in Irish immigration during the war, which saw the LVA’s staff reduced, the organisation was quick to raise concerns about the moral wellbeing of Irish young women once peace was resumed. As such, the LVA continued, throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, to provoke concerns about the supposed moral vulnerability of Irish young women in Liverpool in a bid to generate support for their patrols.



1987 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brunon Synak

ABSTRACTThis paper draws on gerontological studies conducted in Poland over the last 20 years to outline a number of changes in the socio-economic circumstances of the elderly population. It begins by examining the impact of demographic factors, with particular emphasis on the post-Second World War migrations and the more recent move to the towns, and goes on to describe trends in health and functional status. It is shown that self-assessed health and even life expectancy have decreased over the last five years, and a number of explanations are suggested. The main part of the paper uses national surveys conducted in the 1960s and in the 1980s to identify changes in the family situation of the elderly. Despite an overall reduction in many forms of family support, it is shown that help from parents and children has increased particularly over the last five years. It is concluded that while various services need to be developed along Western lines, this development should be accompanied by a strengthening of various forms of family care.



2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-219
Author(s):  
REGINA KUNZEL

Psychoanalysis is at once a system of thought, a toolkit for cultural diagnosis and criticism, and a therapeutic practice. In Dagmar Herzog's exciting new book Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes, psychoanalysis is among the most transformative intellectual events of the twentieth century and is itself transformed by that century's roiling forces, shaping and profoundly shaped by politics and culture. Foregrounding the historicity of psychoanalysis requires Herzog to wrest psychoanalysis from its own claims to historical transcendence. “While psychoanalysis is often taken to be ahistorical in its view of human nature,” Herzog writes, “the opposite is the case” (2). After Freud's death, during the heyday of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, through challenges to its authority in the 1960s and 1970s, to what Herzog calls its “second golden age” in the 1980s, the analytic frame offered by psychoanalysis (and the debates it generated) helped people grapple with the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War and offered novel ways of thinking about the most important questions of the postwar decades: about aggression, guilt, trauma, the capacity for violence, indeed about “the very nature of the human self and its motivations” (1).



Author(s):  
Sam Brewitt-Taylor

This chapter locates the immediate origins of British Christian radicalism in the early 1940s. The Second World War was frequently interpreted by Christian commentators as evidence of a profound spiritual crisis in Western civilization. The resulting quest for a new Christianity was pursued, amongst others, by J.H. Oldham, Kathleen Bliss, Ronald Gregor Smith, Alec Vidler, and John Robinson. Many of these figures went on to become leading figures in the Christian radicalism of the 1960s. The perception that Western civilization was experiencing an unprecedented crisis encouraged readings of modern history influenced by Christian eschatology, which argued that the Church’s central mission was to help transform the world. In the 1950s, the memory of this crisis encouraged British theology’s engagement with American and German radical theologians, including Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, and Tillich. This tradition only required fresh imagined crises to regain its momentum in the 1960s.



Antiquity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (376) ◽  
pp. 1084-1087
Author(s):  
J. Eva Meharry

The discipline of archaeology in Afghanistan was at a turning point when the original editions of The archaeology of Afghanistan and the Archaeological gazetteer of Afghanistan were published in 1978 and 1982, respectively. The first three decades of modern archaeological activity in Afghanistan (1920s–1940s) were dominated by French archaeologists who primarily focused on the pre-Islamic past, particularly the Buddhist period. Following the Second World War, however, Afghanistan gradually opened archaeological practice to a more international community. Consequently, the scope of archaeological exploration expanded to include more robust studies of the prehistoric, pre-Islamic and Islamic periods. In the 1960s, the Afghan Institute of Archaeology began conducting its own excavations, and by the late 1970s, national and international excavations were uncovering exciting new discoveries across the country. These archaeological activities largely halted as Afghanistan descended into chaos during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989) and the Afghan Civil War (1989–2001); the Afghan Institute of Archaeology was the only archaeological institute continuing operations. The original editions of the volumes under review were therefore timely and poignant publications that captured the peak of archaeological activity in twentieth-century Afghanistan and became classic texts on the subject.



2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 158-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Wild

Until the 1940s, English translations of the Qur'an were (with the notable exception of translations by Indian Muslims early in the twentieth century) mostly undertaken by non-Muslims and viewed with some misgiving by most Muslim scholars. As late as 1929 the Egyptian al-Azhar, internationally regarded as the most prestigious Muslim organisation in the world, publically burnt a translation of the Qur'an, even though it had been translated by a Muslim. It was only well after the Second World War that the Egyptian authorities officially allowed the publication of a translation of the Qur'an. More recently, English translations by Muslims have proliferated and now flourish worldwide: as far as the number of Qur'an-translations is concerned, no other language is better represented. However, diverging English translations of the Qur'an have become more and more of a religious and political battleground. This article discusses the development of English from a ‘coloniser's language’ to an English ‘friendly to Islam’ – especially in India and Pakistan. It also sketches the impact of Christian missionary translations of the Qur'an into English and discusses the problems faced by scholars with regard to English as a powerful second language, specifically in terms of the King Fahd Complex for Printing the Holy Qur'an in Saudi Arabia, which has gradually taken prominence over Al-Azhar on the international stage since the 1980s.



2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-224
Author(s):  
Jörn Lindner

AbstractTechnical innovation as protection against economic decline? The development of the Rickmers shipyard from 1945 to the late 1960sThe article covers the history of the Rickmers-Shipyard in Bremerhaven from the end of the Second World War up to the end of the 1960s. An initial glance into the interwar years establishes that the shipyard’s restructuring in the 20s and subsequent shift into the production of warships during the 30s and 40s had considerable impact on its afterwar development. Despite the involvement with the Kriegsmarine, Rickmers was able to reopen for business very quickly after the end of the war. Yet, the shipyard was barred from new building projects and relegated to repair jobs for a considerable amount of time. In the 1950s, Rickmers began building new ships and was able to somewhat profit from the shipbuilding boom of the time. Still, most projects proved unprofitable and the onset of the crisis of European shipbuilding in the late 1950s hit the shipyard hard. This set the stage for Rickmers’ decline and ultimate closure in 1986.



Author(s):  
Kirsten Leng

The Conclusion accounts for the fate of the women whose ideas are examined in this book, and takes stock of the legacies of their sexological work. It further lays out the benefits of pursuing a larger twentieth century history of women’s sexological work, one that is international in its scope and grapples with the rupture in female sexual knowledge production affected by the Second World War and its geopolitical realignments, the reshuffling of the ideological landscapes after 1945, and the rise of new social movements in the 1960s. Finally, the Conclusion argues that the history of women’s sexological work is especially significant at this particular moment in time, as twenty-first century feminist theorists positively embrace science and nature as intellectual and rhetorical resources once again.



2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Vincent

The history of Chinese migration to Australia and in particular the impact of discriminatory legislation has been the subject of considerable scholarship. Less well documented is the contribution of Chinese immigrants to Australia’s food culture. Chinese cooks had been at work in Australia since at least the 1850s, and cafés and restaurants were serving Chinese food in both urban and rural centres by the 1930s. The first cookery books devoted to Chinese recipes were written by Australian Chinese and published after the Second World War. They provided the curious and the adventurous with information that allowed them to both confidently order food in restaurants and experiment with cooking at home. An important and neglected source, this survey of these publications suggests some of the ways in which Chinese cooks adapted and adopted to produce an ‘Australianized’ Chinese menu.



2021 ◽  
pp. 57-81
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Telesca

‘The treatment of devaluation as if it were tantamount to hauling down the flag is really very silly’, wrote the Westminster Bank’s economic advisor, R. J. Clark in 1968. Yet, one cannot escape the impression that, on the occasion of the different currency crises that since the gold standard abandonment of 1931 invested the British economy during the twentieth century, the debate went well beyond the decision to produce ‘a change in the price of sterling in terms of other currencies. A technical change made for technical reasons’. The troubles with the pound during the twentieth century, particularly after the Second World War, have attracted the attention of political economists, political, international, and economic historians. Rather than reviving one of the most debated issues in British historiography, this chapter seeks to understand whether the memory of the 1931 abandonment of the gold standard—the ‘mother’ of all currency crises of the twentieth century—played a role on the occasion of other (loosely defined) currency crises. The focus of this chapter is on the 1967 devaluation. In line with this book’s aim to reflect on how and by whom financial crises have been remembered, and what use has been made of the memory of financial crises, this chapter will be looking at the actors remembering and using the events of 1931 in the 1960s, particularly within the Labour party.



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