Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918)

2021 ◽  
pp. 33-42
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley
Keyword(s):  
Home Front ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Shell Shock ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Invisible

This is the first of four chapters that deal with the theme of impossible nostos in the context of war and its aftermath. Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier was one of the first literary responses to the Great War and to the invisible wound of shell shock. The chapter argues that West also anticipated Joyce’s Ulysses by opening a dialogue between her own generation and Homer’s Odyssey. Less explicitly than Joyce, she has appropriated key elements of Odysseus’ nostos and either rearranged or inverted them. Although the novel announces itself in its title as a story of male nostos, what immediately strikes the reader is that it is told not from the perspective of the returning soldier, or Odysseus figure, but from that of a latter-day Penelope. The chapter also argues that West’s purpose is to highlight her society’s destabilized notions of home and homecoming, and challenge the prelapsarian reading of the last summer before the war and the Ithacan images of England used to recruit fighting men and mythologize the home front.

scholarly journals Shell Shock and the Legacy of the Victorian Past in the Present: Remembering WWI in Pat Barker’s Another World

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Elodie Rousselot
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
Great War ◽  
Great Success ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Shell Shock ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

In her 1998 novel Another World, Pat Barker draws from a topic on which she has written previously with great success—the First World War and the experiences of its combatants—and yet approaches that topic from a completely different perspective. The novel returns to the Great War to consider notions of ‘shell shock’, attitudes towards WWI veterans, and the problems surrounding remembering past violence, but what is perhaps surprising about Another World is that it uses a Victorian storyline to address these concerns, and presents the First World War through the means of references to nineteenth-century culture.

“Cry with the Pack and Kill What We Fear”

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-142
Author(s):  
E. H. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Group Cohesion ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Great War ◽  
Women Playwrights ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Central Purpose

After the Great War, women playwrights began to write drama addressing the consequences of war for women, the home front and for humanity as a whole and positing strategies for ways in which future wars might be prevented. This essay explores the work of these women playwrights and makes comparisons between their dramas and Woolf’s thinking about war in her novels and Three Guineas. Woolf and playwrights such as Vernon Lee, Cicely Hamilton, Muriel Box, Olive Popplewell and Elizabeth Rye ask us to examine nationalism as a catalyst for conflict and to take up the position of ‘outsiders’ in order to question our place in supporting future wars. In light of this, the essay will also address form, particularly pageantry as a mode that all these authors use to undermine the central purpose of pageantry which is to create the group cohesion that these writers believe leads to conflict.

scholarly journals The Great War and popular modernism: Pat Hanna's Louis XI

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-142
Author(s):  
Richard Fotheringham
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Great War ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Shell Shock ◽  
Popular Theatre ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Great War

AbstractPat Hanna's Famous Diggers, a professional vaudeville theatre troupe comprising ex-Great War Anzac soldiers (initially, mainly New Zealanders, as Hanna was himself) played for nearly two years (1923–24) at the old Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane. One item Hanna premiered at the Cremorne was Louis XI, a short (ten-minute) comic sketch he wrote himself. Modernism in the inter-war years, given its usual location within avant-garde aesthetics, high culture, internationalism and radical politics, is not — with the notable exception of Brecht's cabaret work in the 1920s — usually associated with popular theatre. While one comic playlet hardly challenges that positioning, Louis XI was a direct result of the Great War's profound reshaping of modern life. Many of the dramatised sketches performed by Hanna's company, including Louis XI, were structured around a contrast between events as they had occurred in the trenches and as they were portrayed in a utopian or dystopian fantasy, sometimes triggered by shell shock or a dream. Several, again including Louis XI, involve the past, and express the curiosity and cultural dislocation Australian- and New Zealand-born soldiers felt as they moved for the first time through real-life landscapes and architecture they had known only from popular history and romance.

The Great War, Independence, and Latvian Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4 (463)) ◽  
pp. 9-21
Author(s):  
Benedikts Kalnačs
Keyword(s):  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Written Sources

The article focuses on the representation of the year 1918 in Latvian literature. On November 18, the independent Republic of Latvia was proclaimed, and in the years to come international recognition of the state’s sovereignty followed. In retrospect, this event stimulated a number of salutary descriptions and interpretations and certainly provides a milestone in the history of the Latvian nation. It is, however, also important to discuss the proclamation of independence in the context of the Great War that brought a lot of suffering to the inhabitants of Latvia. Therefore, a critical evaluation of the events preceding the year 1918 is certainly worthy of discussion. The article first sketches the historical and geopolitical contexts of the period immediately before and during the Great War as well as the changed situation in its aftermath. This introduction is followed by a discussion of the novel 18 (2014) by the contemporary Latvian author Pauls Bankovskis (b. 1973) that provides a critical retrospective of the events leading to the proclamation of the nation state from a twenty-first century perspective. Bankovskis employs an intertextual approach, engaging with a number of earlier publications dealing with the same topic. Among the authors included are Anna Brigadere, Aleksandrs Grīns, Sergejs Staprāns, Mariss Vētra, and others. The paper contextualizes the contribution of these writers within the larger historical picture of the Great War and the formation of the nation states and speculates on the contemporary relevance of the representation of direct experience, and the use of written sources related to these events.

scholarly journals The Impact of World War I on Middle East “Arabs” in Awwad’s “Al-Raghif”: A Cultural Perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-36
Author(s):  
Lateef Wisam Hamid
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
World War ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War

Abstract My paper will explore the genre of war narrative from a cultural perspective, namely the impact of the Great War on Arabs in the novel Al-Raghif (The Loaf’) in 1939 by the Lebanese novelist Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad, as it is the first Arabic novel which is totally concerned with WWI and its longlasting consequences: hunger, despair and the elusive promise of freedom to Arabs.

Canada through World War I

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian C. D. Moffat
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Canadian Army ◽  
British Colony ◽  
The One ◽  
The Great War

The Great War was the world event that began the evolution of Canada from a self-governing British colony to a great independent country. However, one of Canada’s failings is its self-deprecation and modesty. Canada has produced a number of historic works documenting and analyzing Canada’s accomplishments and the individuals who made them happen. Although much was written by actual participants in the interwar years, the majority of the objective and analytical works have only slowly emerged after the Second World War when history became a respected academic discipline. This annotated bibliography gives a cross section of the Canadian Great War historiography with the majority of the work having been produced after 1980. The Canadian Army and the role of Canadians serving in the British Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service have good coverage in Canadian monographs. The one area of study that has a dearth of work is on the Royal Canadian Navy since it had a very small role in the Great War and did not come into its own until after 1939. Nonetheless, there are a number of works included that show the Navy’s fledgling accomplishments between 1914 and 1918, as well as the efforts of the British Admiralty to restrict the Royal Canadian Navy’s actions in defense of its own area of operations. This bibliography also contains works on prisoners of war, the psychological effects of trench warfare on Canadians serving at the front, the internment of enemy aliens in Canada, and effects of the war on the home front, including one French work analyzing French Quebec’s changing attitude to World War I over the length of the 20th century.

Hall, Radclyffe (1880–1943)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Great War ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
King's College ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Well Of Loneliness

Radclyffe Hall was a British novelist, poet, and lyricist. A contemporary of the Bloomsbury Group and proponent of Havelock Ellis's sexological theories, Hall is best known for the ground-breaking novel of sexual inversion, The Well of Loneliness (1928). The novel was the center of a landmark obscenity trial, and has continued to attract controversy. Its depiction of inversion has been both lauded and criticized by feminist, queer, and trans theorists. Hall was born Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe-Hall on August 12, 1880 to wealthy parents who divorced in 1883. She briefly attended King's College London and spent a year studying in Germany. In 1912 Hall converted to Catholicism with her partner at the time, the singer Mabel Batten. At Batten’s request, Hall did not serve in the women’s ambulance corps during the Great War (Baker). However, a number of Hall’s fictional characters find autonomy and sexual identity through their war service.

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