Sacrifice and Modern War Literature

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Faith ◽  
War Literature ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Modern War ◽  
First World

Sacrifice and Modern War Literature is the first book to explore how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. It has been common for critics to argue that after the First World War many of the cultural and religious values associated with sacrifice have been increasingly rejected by writers and others. As the contributors to this volume show, though, literature has continued to address how different conceptions of sacrifice have been invoked in times of war to convert losses into gains or ideals. While those conceptions have sometimes been rooted in a secular rationalism that values lost lives in terms of political or national victories, spiritual and religious conceptions of sacrifice are also still in evidence—as with the ‘martyrdom operations’ of jihadis fighting against the ‘war on terror’. The volume’s fifteen chapters each present fresh insights into the literature of a particular conflict. Most of the authors discussed are major war writers (e.g. Wordsworth, Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, Elizabeth Bowen), but important writers who have received less critical attention are also featured (e.g. Dora Sigerson, Richard Aldington, Thomas Kinsella, Nadeem Aslam). Discussion ranges across a variety of genres: predominantly novels and poetry (particularly elegy and lyric), but also memoirs and some films. The range of literature examined complements the rich array of topics related to wartime sacrifice that the contributors discuss—including scapegoating, martyrdom, religious faith, tragedy, heroism, altruism, ‘bare life’, atonement, and redemption.

Reclaiming a Martyr: French Catholics and the Cult of Joan of Arc, 1890–1920

1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 359-370
Author(s):  
James F. McMillan
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Short Communication ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Religion And Nationalism ◽  
First World

Joan of Arc died at the stake in Rouen in 1431. She became a canonized saint of the Catholic Church only in 1920. It is well known that the wheels of the Vatican grind slowly, but 500 years is a long period to wait for sanctity, even by Roman standards. Obviously, in a short communication such as this, there is no time to explore the rich afterlife which Joan enjoyed between her death and her canonization. Rather, the more modest purpose of this paper is to show how her achievement of canonical status was preceded by a well-orchestrated campaign conducted by French Catholics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If Joan was finally reclaimed as a Catholic saint and martyr, it was primarily because she was successfully represented as the very epitome of a heady blend of religion and nationalism that was one of the more distinctive and powerful forces of the era of the belle époque and the First World War.

STRATEGIC BOMBING AND RESTRAINT IN ‘TOTAL WAR’, 1915–1918

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 413-431
Author(s):  
ANDREW BARROS
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
World War ◽  
Total War ◽  
Strategic Bombing ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Modern War ◽  
First World

ABSTRACTRecent studies of ‘total war’ depict a process of inexorable expansion leading to an often nebulous linkage of everything to war. This article takes the study of ‘total war’ in the opposite direction by studying a specific example of strategic restraint. It examines how the French bombing strategy that was developed over the course of the First World War went to considerable lengths to maintain a distinction between the civilian and the military. The article studies France's restraint by highlighting the strategic, geographical, institutional, and economic factors upon which it was built. It then goes on to examine the political pressures for an expansion of bombing which proved incapable of overturning this policy. Finally, it contrasts French restraint with that of its key ally, Great Britain. There, bombing developed into a strategic weapon designed to destroy the ‘home front’. This study of restraint underscores the importance of limits, and the attendant choices government has to make, in understanding the course and intensity of a country's mobilization for modern war.

BLAST (1914–1915)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Waddell
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
First World War ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
World War ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

BLAST was an early modernist ‘little magazine’ edited by Wyndham Lewis in London. Not to be confused with Alexander Berkman’s San Francisco-based anarchist newspaper The Blast (1916–17), BLAST proclaimed the arrival of the English avant-garde movement Vorticism. BLAST ran for two volumes, appearing in July 1914 and July 1915, before the First World War forced it to end. The magazine’s two instalments represent a key example of pre-war avant-garde periodical culture, and are recognised as exemplifying, through the differing commitments of their various contributors, some of the overlapping alliances and antagonisms of London’s early modernist socio-cultural scene. Key contributions include Lewis’s play Enemy of the Stars (1914) and stories by Ford Madox Ford (‘The Saddest Story’, 1914) and Rebecca West (‘Indissoluble Matrimony’, 1914). In promoting Vorticism, BLAST championed an intellectual aesthetic based on contemplative detachment and foregrounded inter-subjective relations. Both volumes of BLAST were heavily illustrated, featuring visual contributions from Jessie Dismorr, Jacob Epstein, Frederick Etchells, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Spencer Gore, Cuthbert Hamilton, Jacob Kramer, Lewis himself, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Dorothy Shakespear, and Edward Wadsworth.

‘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.

Peace through Law: Lessons from 1914

2021 ◽  
pp. 241-258
Author(s):  
B.S. Chimni
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Times ◽  
First World

The theme ‘peace through law’ has engaged the continued attention of states and international law scholars – and indeed for a much longer time than often assumed, as the chapters in Part III have shown. In the context of the First World War, the urgency of this project again became particularly clear. But despite the changes in the normative and institutional structures since the beginning of the twentieth century, wars are still with us. It is in this context that Bhupinder S. Chimni revisits the rich reflections of the times on the causes of the First World War and asks whether more international law could have prevented the war. The aim is to draw certain lessons for our times.

David Jones: The Heroic Vision

1962 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Johnston
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Contemporary Reality ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Rupert Brooke ◽  
Modern War ◽  
First World

ItIs one of the ironies of English literary history that World War I, the first great modern war, coincided with what C. Day Lewis calls ‘a period of very low vitality’ for poetry. There were no Edwardian or Georgian figures to match the stature of Tennyson or Browning; the main tendencies of the age were visible not in the genius of one or two master spokesmen but in the talents of a host of minor poets. These poets, reacting to the disintegration of nineteenth-century values and conventions, turned from the contemporary reality to the peace and certainty afforded by the mellow beauties of the English countryside. In the words of their most gifted representative, Rupert Brooke, the Georgians sought ‘to forget/The lies, the truths, and pain …’; poetry became a shelter, an escape, an anodyne, a nostalgic daydream. The first Georgian Poetry anthology (1912), as Vivian de Sola Pinto remarks, ‘is a strange collection to represent English poetry at the moment when Europe was preparing for the First World War and England's stability was being rocked by the constitutional crisis and the impending disruption of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.’ The characteristic qualities of Georgian poetry — its blandness, its decorum, its homogeneity, its simplicity of attitude — all reflect the decline of a once powerful imaginative vision. Lyric poetry had become a mere exercise of sensibility related neither to the modern reality nor to any intellectual or imaginative vision capable of assimilating it.

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