Bombed Churches

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Advisory Committee ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Church Architecture ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
World War ◽  
Louis Macneice ◽  
Arts Festival ◽  
Second World

More often than not, the blitz was represented by bombed churches. Images of St Paul’s Cathedral soaring above smoke and, in a more tragic key, the ruins of St Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry encapsulate the values that Britons thought they were fighting for in the Second World War. John Piper, Cecil Beaton, Hanslip Fletcher, and other visual artists, many of them employed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), expressed their ideas about British heritage through paintings, drawings, and photographs of church architecture. At the same time, writers such as Virginia Woolf, John Strachey, John Betjeman, and Louis MacNeice modulated their patriotism—with quibbles and caveats—into ‘a faith to fight for’. Drawing on poetry, novels, tracts, newspaper articles, and visual culture, this chapter demonstrates the propagandistic value of bombed churches during the Second World War, then flashes forward to the consecration of the rebuilt cathedral in Coventry, which opened with great fanfare and an arts festival in May 1962.

The Ecology of English Time

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-178
Author(s):  
Beryl Pong
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
World War ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Four Quartets ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Second World

At a time when the English landscape was mobilized—both materially and in the cultural imagination—for fighting the Second World War, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot fashioned their most ‘English’ works, Between the Acts (1941) and Four Quartets (1935–42) respectively. Building on extant scholarship surrounding the writers’ temporal and environmental concerns, Chapter 6 provides an alternative account of the writers’ supposed national insularity as one inflected by pacifist and internationalist motivations. Tracing the study of ecology as it was historically intertwined with cosmopolitical inquiry in the twentieth century, the chapter reveals ways in which the writers’ late modernist works uphold Anglocentric exceptionalism but, also, provide diversified understandings of time and place to convey international belonging.

Writing the Radio War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Whittington
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Identity ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Louis Macneice ◽  
Imperial Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Compromise ◽  
To Come ◽  
Second World

Writing the Radio War positions the Second World War as a critical moment in the history of cultural mediation in Britain. Through chapters focusing on the ‘broadbrow’ radicalism of J.B. Priestley, ground-breaking works by Louis MacNeice and James Hanley at the BBC Features Department, frontline reporting by Denis Johnston, and the emergence of a West Indian literary identity in the broadcasts of Una Marson, Writing the Radio War explores how these writers capitalized on the particularities of the sonic medium to communicate their visions of wartime and postwar Britain and its empire. By combining literary aesthetics with the acoustics of space, accent, and dialect, writers created aural communities that at times converged, and at times contended, with official wartime versions of Britain and Britishness. Though rarely controversial, the broadcasts of these writers navigated an environment of political compromise in order to present new articulations of British and imperial identity that set the stage for the postwar multi-ethnic welfare state to come.

scholarly journals Bibliography of Books Published in 2010 and of Some Books Published Earlier

2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-492
Author(s):  
Kurt Siehr
Keyword(s):  
Advisory Committee ◽  
Annual Report ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
The Hague ◽  
Second World

Advisory Committee on the Assessment of Restitution Applications for Items of Cultural Value and the Second World War (ed.). Report 2009. The Hague: 2010. 88 pp. No ISBN or ISSN. No price. This is the last annual report of the Dutch Advisory Committee on Restitution. The report informs the public of 16 applications in which the return of art objects have been demanded in 2009. In about 50% of cases, the objects were returned. The applications of the other 50% were rejected.

scholarly journals Archaeologies of Sound: Reconstructing Louis MacNeice's Wartime Radio Publics

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Whittington
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
Public Activity ◽  
Good Citizenship ◽  
Louis Macneice ◽  
Audience Responses ◽  
Second World

Attempts to recover the audible experience of the Second World War are often frustrated by the paradox that the acoustic past is available in theory but elusive in practice. Focusing on the archival traces left by poet and broadcaster Louis MacNeice, this paper considers how scholars might reconstruct past radio publics – affiliative and critical communities of listening – from a partial record. As one of the most prominent and celebrated scriptwriters at the wartime BBC, MacNeice played a major role in shaping the British public's sense of itself and of the war. For MacNeice, good listening was good citizenship: in two major works, Alexander Nevsky (1941) and Christopher Columbus (1942), he uses aurally astute characters and layered acoustic spaces to model the process of navigating the crowded soundscapes of war. The plays build auditory worlds that mediate between the poles of hearing as a subjective, interior practice and listening as a public activity with political resonances. Through a close examination of scripts, recordings, production notes, and audience responses relating to these two plays, this paper traces the outline of the absent experience of listening in order to better understand the wartime British radio public.

scholarly journals Materialist Society in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Kadhim Hatem Kaibr ◽  
Jingjing Guo
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Ideal Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
Second World

After the Second World War, The American materialistic society was one of the most themes criticized in most of Albee’s early plays. He paid a great attention to the negative impact of “American Dream” project and the negative impact of this project on the behavior of American individual. Albee explains that the “American Dream” project means the absence of the highest values and principles of humanity and this project will cause a gap between family members and between the family and society. Through Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This paper will attempt to highlight on how the American individual directly affected by the materialism community which has become used to administer the American daily life, also highlight on the social hypocrisy that the high American class lived and explain how the American culture has lost the real principles to build an ideal society in which humans can live in harmony.

Gender and the Second World War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinna Peniston-Bird ◽  
Emma Vickers
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document