War Work

Russomania ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 241-318
Author(s):  
Rebecca Beasley
Keyword(s):  
Russian Literature ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
British Government ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
John Middleton Murry ◽  
Western Civilisation ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
First World

Alliance with tsarist Russia during the First World War presented a propaganda challenge for the British government: many believed that to support Russia against Germany was to support a barbarous nation against its own subjects, and to risk tipping the balance of power in Europe away from democracy. Russian literature was strategically deployed by the War Propaganda Bureau as evidence of Russia’s civilization, and writers and critics were marshalled to overturn the anti-tsarist interpretations of Russian literature put in place by the Russian populists. Russian literature now appeared in a new guise, read not through realism but symbolism, a movement introduced to Britain through the performances of the Ballets Russes, the travel writings of Stephen Graham, and reappraisals of Dostoevsky’s writings. The chapter concludes by examining the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and John Middleton Murry, which resists wartime propaganda, and finds in Russian literature a critique of Western civilisation and its war.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Collins ◽  
Charles Tripp
Keyword(s):  
Civil Servant ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Process ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Archaeological Work ◽  
Western Civilisation ◽  
First World

Gertrude Bell’s judgments as both a scholar and a civil servant were informed by her education, social position and patrician views. Her travel writings, photography and archaeological work reveal the tensions that existed between Bell’s industrial, rational background and an imagined timeless ‘Orient’, the racial origins of which were being understood as a source of Western civilisation. Bell’s expertise became strategically vital with the outbreak of the First World War and, as a member of British Army Intelligence and then ‘Oriental Secretary’ – the only woman serving as a political officer – her cultural, archaeological, historical and ethnographic knowledge and understandings were transformed into political intelligence and administrative reason. They shaped Bell’s views about those she felt should govern in Iraq, which had a fateful and lasting effect on the organisation of power and privilege in the state, and underpinned the importance she placed on the region’s archaeological past as an element in the state-building process.

scholarly journals Russian First World War Propaganda Literature through Its Anthologies. Some Observations on Russian Soldier-Literature and Journalistic Reporting

Literature ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-70
Author(s):  
Luca Cortesi
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
War Literature ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
First World War ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
First World

In the Soviet era, Russian involvement in WWI long represented an ostracised and even forgotten event. This very attitude is reflected by Soviet literary criticism of WWI war literature. Taking into account both the studies which re-examined this part of Russian literature in a less ideologically biased manner and the stances that major writers of that period took towards the war, the aim of this paper is to investigate Russian Soldier-literature as presented in anthologies published in the wake of the First World War. The publishing of short stories, journalistic reporting and poems actually (or allegedly) composed by soldiers themselves can be interpreted as a symptomatic expression of a broader cultural discourse that was common at that time, and of which state propaganda publications often availed themselves.

Mutinies after War

2021 ◽  
pp. 166-190
Author(s):  
Keith Grint
Keyword(s):  
Far East ◽  
First World War ◽  
Canadian Forces ◽  
British Government ◽  
World War ◽  
Canadian Army ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Return Home ◽  
First World

If mutinies are significant threats to those military parties facing defeat during wars, they are still more dangerous to the victors after the war is ended, when those conscripted for the duration of the war are desperate to return home. This chapter covers three such mutinies: those affecting British forces in 1918 and 1919; those facing Canadian forces in 1919; and finally the mutiny that literally grounded the RAF in 1946 in India and the Far East. The first cases occur in the south of England and France as the First World War is ending, but Churchill in particular was keen to retain both naval and army units to continue the fight against the fledgling Bolshevik regime. What is intriguing about these is just how militant the mutineers were and how the British government treated them with kid gloves, unlike those in the British Foreign Labour units who we meet in chapter 6. For the Canadian army the problem starts in Russia but end up in Wales, as the troops kick their heels waiting to return home and frustrations boil over into gunfights near Rhyl in 1919. Finally, we consider the similar issues prevailing over the RAF in India and the Far East as it becomes clear to the subordinates that they are a long way from home and have little immediate prospect of going home—unless they mutiny.

“The Methods of Barbarism” and the “Rights of Small Nations”: War Propaganda and British Pluralism

1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Use Of Force ◽  
First World War ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
World War ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
Liberal Vision ◽  
First World

The “methods of barbarism” and the “rights of small nations” are perhaps the most recognizable of British slogans arising out of the wars of the early twentieth century. They are instantly associated with the Boer War and the First World War respectively, but seldom are they associated with each other. However, the Pro-Boer rhetoric of “the methods of barbarism” and the First World War propaganda of “the rights of small nations” are intimately linked through their roots in the pluralist Liberal vision of Britishness.These slogans and the propaganda campaigns that they epitomized must be understood within the context of a multicultural Britain and opposing notions of British national identity. Defining “barbarism” as the oppression of small nations through the brutal use of force, the Pro-Boers associated the term with the Anglocentric vision of the British nation reflected in the “New Imperialism” of the Conservatives. Through their belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, the Conservative imperialists maintained that small nations like those of the Irish, the Welsh, and the Boers would either be assimilated or swept aside by the historical progress of an expanding Anglo-Saxon nation state. In contrast to this notion of Conservative “barbarism,” the Pro-Boer Liberals drew on the Gladstonian heritage of their party in defining the United Kingdom as a multinational state at the center of a multinational empire. They eschewed the use of force in the maintenance of empire and argued that the bonds of imperialism must be based upon mutual goodwill, voluntarism, and the recognition of the principle of nationality.When the First World War broke out in 1914, propagandists drew upon these contrasting constructions of Liberal cultural pluralism and Conservative cultural uniformity. In terms similar to those employed by the Pro-Boers, British propagandists depicted the First World War as a struggle against German “barbarism” and as a fight to vindicate the “rights of small nations.” Solidly based upon the Liberal construction of the multicultural and multinational nature of Britishness, Britain's role as the champion of the principle of nationality was proclaimed with an eye not only to the international context of Europe but to the domestic context of the British state and empire as well.

Léon Bakst and Fashion: Beyond and After the Ballets Russes

Costume ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Djurdja Bartlett
Keyword(s):  
World War ◽  
Textile Design ◽  
Haute Couture ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Commercial World ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
Changing Times ◽  
First World ◽  
Personal Interests

Shortly after designing costumes for the Ballets Russes' piece Jeux, Léon Bakst collaborated with the couture house Paquin in 1913, and continued to engage with dress and textile design up to his death in 1924, variously embracing oriental, neo-classical and Russian ethnic aesthetic idioms. Due to his symbolist artistic education, personal tastes and financial circumstances, Bakst did not fulfil his dream to design new fashions for the woman of the future within the commercial world of haute couture. Instead, most of his dress designs during the First World War until his death were created as one-off pieces for a group of very rich, extravagant women. Bakst was nevertheless a passionate advocate of modernity, and a skilful manipulator in the field of contemporary media, in which he equally vigorously promoted his own oeuvre, the phenomenon of fashion and the concept of a new emancipated woman. Bakst's retrograde aesthetic and his progressive writings show him as a striving modernist, carefully navigating his personal interests and business opportunities in the rapidly changing times at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article integrates Bakst's dress designs and his thoughts in the global discourse on the concepts of fashion, modernity, feminism and cosmopolitanism.

scholarly journals Scandal in Mesopotamia: Press, empire, and India during the First World War

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 1395-1445
Author(s):  
MANU SEHGAL ◽  
SAMIKSHA SEHRAWAT
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
British Press ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
First World

AbstractBy providing the first comprehensive account of the role of the British and Indian press in war propaganda, this article makes an intervention in the global history of the First World War. The positive propaganda early in the war, intertwined with a rhetoric of loyalism, contrasted with how the conservative British press affixed blame for military defeats in Mesopotamia upon the colonial regime's failure to effectively mobilize India's resources. Using a highly emotive and enduring trope of the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’, the Northcliffe press was successful in channelling a high degree of public scrutiny onto the campaign. The effectiveness of this criticism ensured that debates about the Mesopotamian debacle became a vehicle for registering criticism of structures of colonial rule and control in India. On the one hand, this critique hastened constitutional reforms and devolution in colonial India and, on the other, it led to demands that the inadequacy of India's contribution to the war be remedied by raising war loans. Both the colonial government and its nationalist critics were briefly and paradoxically united in opposing these demands. The coercive extraction of funds for the imperial war effort as well as the British press's vituperative criticism contributed to a post-war, anti-colonial political upsurge. The procedure of creating a colonial ‘scandal’ out of a military disaster required a specific politics for assessing the regulated flows of information, which proved to be highly effective in shaping both the enquiry that followed and the politics of interwar colonial South Asia.

The Athenaeum: ‘Wanted, a New Word’ (World)

2019 ◽  
pp. 181-242
Author(s):  
Chris Mourant
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
First World War ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Spiritual Crisis ◽  
Literary Journal ◽  
John Middleton Murry ◽  
Critical Writings ◽  
First World

Between April 1919 and December 1920, Mansfield found her voice as a literary critic, publishing over a hundred reviews under the initials ‘K.M.’ in the literary journal The Athenaeum, edited by John Middleton Murry. In her reviews, Mansfield linked the ‘new word’ of modernist formal experimentation with the spatial imaginary of an ‘undiscovered country’ or ‘new world’, a critical vocabulary formulated in response to the disintegration and ‘spiritual crisis’ of the First World War. The chapter positions Mansfield’s work in relation to writings by D. H. Lawrence and Murry, before tracing a dialogue between her reviews and Virginia Woolf’s critical writings in the years 1919–20. The chapter highlights the ways in which both Mansfield and Woolf privileged deep ‘emotion’ as the basis for a modernist ‘new word’.

‘Her Heritage Was that Tragic Optimism’: Edwardian Pastoral

2017 ◽  
pp. 56-86
Author(s):  
Nick Hubble
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
World War ◽  
Proletarian Literature ◽  
New Class ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

George Orwell suggested that proletarian literature began before the First World War when Ford Madox Ford, the editor of the English Review, met D.H. Lawrence and saw in him the portent of a new class finding expression in literature. Chapter one of this book explores the extent to which Ford was already anticipating the ideas of William Empson in his Edwardian pastoral, which is seen as a mode of discourse concerned with rethinking social relations and a key progenitor of both modernism and proletarian literature. The chapter also discusses Ford and H.G. Wells as uneasy collaborators in ‘music-hall’ modernism and analyses the urban explorations of both Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

Emotions in Times of War: Private and Public, Individual and Collective

Total War ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 21-39
Author(s):  
Ute Frevert
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Entire Duration ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
First World

In private and public affairs the concepts of honour and shame were crucial from the outbreak and throughout the entire duration of the First World War. The roots of these concepts can be traced back to a highly gendered 19th-century aristocratic-bourgeois code of honour and duty, which in 1914 was translated into the willingness to sacrifice one’s own life and the life of beloved ones. While in the early days of the war propaganda focused on female (sexual) honour and the role of protective chivalrous males, humiliation and public shaming—of enemies, ‘cowards’, and POWs, for example—eventually became common practice in warfare and on the Home Front. Yet as the war and its hardships raged on, more and more people became sceptical of these attitudes. Finally, when the war ended, ‘honour’ maintained its importance, especially in negotiating and bearing the terms of armistice and peace.

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