Realist Fiction since 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Coates
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Accurate Picture ◽  
Traditional Mode ◽  
Post War ◽  
Local Languages

In Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, realism was the traditional mode for fiction throughout the first half of the twentieth century, harnessed to the call of establishing distinctive national identities. Realism evolved very differently in these three nations, but it remained the dominant mode in the post-war decade, albeit always and increasingly in contention with and affected by modernist and, later, postmodernist influences. In the South Pacific, literary writing often began with the transcription of myths and stories from local languages, but otherwise most fiction has relied on realism, especially in the decolonizing effort to assert an accurate picture of local life as a counter to white colonial narratives. The chapter examines how the realist novel has evolved in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Pacific.

Institutionalisation in twentieth-century New Zealand

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-164
Author(s):  
Carol Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Intellectual Disabilities ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Mental Deficiency ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Post War ◽  
Mental Defectives ◽  
The Impact

This chapter focuses on the impact of processes of institutionalisation on the lives of people with learning/ intellectual disabilities in twentieth century New Zealand. At the beginning of the twentieth century the country had a burgeoning asylum system, an 1899 immigration act prohibiting ‘idiot persons’, a growing eugenics movement and social policy which sought the confinement of those regarded as difficult or deficient in some way. New Zealand’s Mental Defectives Act of 1911 preceded the British Mental Deficiency Act by two years. An anti-institutionalisation movement began early in post-war New Zealand and by the end of the century there had been a paradigm shift in ideas about how and where people labelled intellectually disabled should live. While problems and challenges remain, and the reform movement goes on, the success of the deinstitutionalization movement should not be underestimated.

The Formation of a Budding Man Alone: The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
World War ◽  
Value System ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Family

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-44
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Arctic Circle ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
Formative Experience ◽  
Post War

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

Towards the Final Legitimation of the Party

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
The Political ◽  
Party Formation ◽  
Post War ◽  
Dominant Influence

Chapter 3 investigates the process of party formation in France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, and demonstrates the important role of cultural and societal premises for the development of political parties in the nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid in this context to the conditions in which the two mass parties, socialists and Christian democrats, were established. A larger set of Western European countries included in this analysis is thoroughly scrutinized. Despite discontent among traditional liberal-conservative elites, full endorsement of the political party was achieved at the beginning of the twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of the interwar totalitarian party, especially under the guise of Italian and German fascism, when ‘the party’ attained its most dominant influence as the sole source and locus of power. The chapter concludes by suggesting hidden and unaccounted heritages of that experience in post-war politics.

Forging a British World of Trade

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Thackeray
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
United Nations ◽  
International Collaboration ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
The Eu

Brexit is likely to lead to the largest shift in Britain’s economic orientation in living memory. Some have argued that leaving the EU will enable Britain to revive markets in Commonwealth countries with which it has long-standing historical ties. Their opponents argue that such claims are based on forms of imperial nostalgia which ignore the often uncomfortable historical trade relations between Britain and these countries, as well as the UK’s historical role as a global, rather than chiefly imperial, economy. This book explores how efforts to promote a ‘British World’ system, centred on promoting trade between Britain and the Dominions, grew and declined in influence between the 1880s and 1970s. At the beginning of the twentieth century many people from London, to Sydney, Auckland, and Toronto considered themselves to belong to culturally British nations. British politicians and business leaders invested significant resources in promoting trade with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa out of a perception that these were great markets of the future. However, ideas about promoting trade between ‘British’ peoples were racially exclusive. From the 1920s onwards colonized and decolonizing populations questioned and challenged the bases of British World networks, making use of alternative forms of international collaboration promoted firstly by the League of Nations and then by the United Nations. Schemes for imperial collaboration amongst ethnically ‘British’ peoples were hollowed out by the actions of a variety of political and business leaders across Asia and Africa who reshaped the functions and identity of the Commonwealth.

Literary Histories

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva-Marie Kröller
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Language ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
The South ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
Historical Methodology ◽  
Literary Histories

This chapter discusses national literary histories in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific and summarises the book's main findings regarding the construction and revision of narratives of national identity since 1950. In colonial and postcolonial cultures, literary history is often based on a paradox that says much about their evolving sense of collective identity, but perhaps even more about the strains within it. The chapter considers the complications typical of postcolonial literary history by focusing on the conflict between collective celebration and its refutation. It examines three issues relating to the histories of English-language fiction in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific: problems of chronology and beginnings, with a special emphasis on Indigenous peoples; the role of the cultural elite and the history wars in the Australian context; and the influence of postcolonial networks on historical methodology.

scholarly journals Solidarity of the shaken: from the experience (Erlebnis) to history

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Belejkaničová
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin ◽  
Ex Nihilo ◽  
Post War ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Usual Pattern

AbstractIn his Heretical Essays, Jan Patočka introduces the concept of the solidarity of the shaken. He argues that it emerges in the conditions of political violence—the frontline experience (Fronterlebnis). Moreover, Patočka brings into discussion the puzzling concepts of day, night, metanoia and sacrifice, which only further problematise the idea. Researching how other thinkers have examined the phenomenon of the frontline experience, it becomes obvious that Patočka did not invent the obscure vocabulary ex nihilo. Concepts such as frontline experience, sacrifice and the metaphors of the day and night were commonly used by thinkers in the inter-war and post-war eras in their examination of community (Gemeinschaft). This study aims to reconstruct the idea of the solidarity of the shaken as contextualized within a broader scholarly debate on the concept of community (Gemeinschaft). Through the critical dialogue between Patočka’s works and the works of Ernst Jünger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, this study will portray how Patočka, in his discourse on the frontline experience, follows the usual pattern of overcoming one’s individuality, transcending and opening up to the constitution of solidarity. This paper will argue that Patočka defined the solidarity of the shaken in an attempt to revive the positive aspects of a community and break with the regressive (if not sinister) uses to which it was put in the twentieth century.

Political Autobiography and the Art of the Plausible: R. A. Butler at the Foreign Office, 1938–1939

1985 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 901-922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Stafford
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Suez Crisis ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Right ◽  
Enoch Powell

R. A. Butler has been one of the outstanding figures in twentieth-century British politics. After his death The Times described him as ‘the creator of the modern educational system, the key-figure in the revival of post-war Conservatism, arguably the most successful chancellor since the war and un-questionably a Home Secretary of reforming zeal’. His record of achievement was unequalled by his rivals in the contests for the party leadership in 1957 and in 1963, but on both occasions the leadership eluded him. How and why this happened was understandably of the greatest interest to those who reviewed Rab's memoirs, The art of the possible, which were published in 1971. These memoirs won unanimous praise for their literary excellence, but otherwise met with a rather mixed reception. Enoch Powell, one of Rab's supporters in 1963, described them as ‘a work of astonishing self-revelation [belonging] with the classic Confessions. Augustine and Rousseau were not more unsparing of themselves than Rab…’ The ‘large episodes’ of Rab's career, Powell went on, ‘are treated with a generous vision (including, it need not be added, a generosity to Rab) which leaves the reader with improved understanding and perspective’. Powell's comments were echoed by others on the Right, but the Left was more critical. Anthony Howard noted that ‘what tend…to get wholly left out are the mistakes and blunders’ – the now infamous Villacoublay meeting during the Suez crisis; and Rab's astonishing admission to the journalist George Gale during the 1964 campaign that the election was slipping Labour's way. Harold Wilson, who had offered Rab the mastership of Trinity, was perhaps the least charitable of all. He found The art of the possible disappointing because, he claimed, Rab underwrote the great occasions. Rab's reticence about Suez, however, upset Wilson less than the description of his tribulations at the hands of Labour MPs as government spokesman for the policy of non-intervention during the Spanish Civil War. Here was an issue which could excite the older soldiers of the British Left, and if Wilson was alone among Rab's reviewers in making more than passing reference to Rab's association with appeasement this was why.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document