The First World War and the Myth of the Young Man's War in Western Europe

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda M. Brian
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Moral High Ground ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

During and after the First World War, authors in several of the main belligerent nations presented the war as a young man's war. The young man's war proved to be a powerful trope, and a myth emerged about the typical trench soldier as handsome, white, and eighteen. In this article, I examine literature about the Great War across several nations – primarily Germany, Great Britain, and France – to demonstrate how and why youth became embedded in the collective memory and representation of the war. I argue, in part, that notions of youth in the early twentieth century allowed participating nations to emphasise innocence and tragedy, claiming the moral high ground in the process. As a result, it is now difficult to accurately depict the First World War soldiers as fathers as well as sons, husbands as well as fiancés, men with careers as well as boys fresh from school. The generation of 1914 must be conceived more broadly, which would disallow easy teleologies to later tragic events in the 1930s.

‘A Wave on to Our Shores’: The Exile and Resettlement of Refugees from the Western Front, 1914–1918

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIERRE PURSEIGLE
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Social Mobilisation ◽  
First World

AbstractIn the wake of the German invasion of Belgium and France in August 1914, four million persons went into exile. While such a displacement of population testified to a dramatic change in the character of war in western Europe, historiography and collective memory alike have so far concurred in marginalising the experience of refugees during the First World War. This article examines their unprecedented encounter with host communities in France and Great Britain. It demonstrates that the refugees' plight reveals the strengths as well as the tensions inherent in the process of social mobilisation that was inseparable from the First World War.

Romance Studies 2: Hispanic Literatures

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas R. Hart
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
William James ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Hispanic Studies ◽  
First World

This chapter examines the history and developments in the study of medieval Hispanic literatures in Great Britain during the twentieth century. It explains that the importance of Hispanic studies in British universities increased greatly after the end of the First World War and that by 1925 there were four professorships in Spanish studies. The first chair of Spanish studies in Cambridge was J.B. Trend. Other notable British hispanists include William James Entwistle and Gerald Brenan.

scholarly journals Recasting Bourgeois Britain?

1986 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Nottingham
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
First World ◽  
Reduced Intensity

In Recasting Bourgeois Europe, his study of the responses of the major States of Western Europe to the conditions created by the First World War, Charles Maier makes only, according to his standards, passing reference to Great Britain. Initially this must appear quite reasonable, for if one compares the post-war situation of Britain with that of most of Continental Europe it must seem that Britain escaped, or at least experienced with a greatly reduced intensity, the disorder which beset other nations. It might therefore be assumed that the efforts of the British political elite to adjust to the post-war world are less worthy of attention than those of their Continental counterparts.

scholarly journals From the Small Serbian Monastery to the London Cathedral: Father Nicholai Velimirovich on a Mission to Great Britain in the First World War

2021 ◽  
Vol I (2) ◽  
pp. 267-342
Author(s):  
Slavica Popović Filipović
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
First World War ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Relief Fund ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

The life and work of father Nicholai Velimirovich (1880–1956) is a limitless historical source, which has been encouraging, for the past 100 years, various researches in the Serbian, English, and other languages around the world. Velimirovich, as a person, and his numerous writings can be viewed from different aspects. This article, that is dedicated to father Nicholai Velimirovich, is an attempt to highlight his mission and role in the Great Britain during the First World War. In order to better understand the importance of his mission, we have described the establishment and operation of the Serbian Relief Fund, the Committee of the Serbian Red Cross Society, and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in their medical and humanitarian missions for the Serbian people in the Great War. Apart from the significant role of father Nicholai Velimirovich, we remember many other great humanists and humanitarians working with and within these various medical and humanitarian missions. With their unforgettable achievements they helped treat people. and to mitigate the terrible suffering of the Serbian people during the great epidemic of typhus in Serbia, and during the great Exodus through the rugged Albanian mountains, during the exile on Corfu, at the Salonica Front, North Africa, Corsica, and France, as well as on the Russian Front, and in Dobruja and even after the Great War. As a representative of the small Serbian nation, father Nicholai Velimirovich held arousing speeches, religious sermons, and wrote numerous literary religious writings, and thereby he confirmed that in the midst of wartime conflagration it is possible for great humane achievements to appear. That is why that impressive spiritual dimension of the mission, which included father Velimirovich and his contemporaries, did not cease to continue to inspire historians, writers and other authors — in the past, present, and the future.

A New History for a New Channel: The Great War and the Launch of BBC2

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Downing
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Front Line ◽  
Television History ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World ◽  
Intense Debate ◽  
Do So

This article considers the making of the BBC2 series, The Great War, and examines issues around the treatment and presentation of the First World War on television, the reception of the series in 1964 and its impact on the making of television history over the last fifty years. The Great War combined archive film with interviews from front-line soldiers, nurses and war workers, giving a totally new feel to the depiction of history on television. Many aspects of The Great War were controversial and raised intense debate at the time and have continued to do so ever since.

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

ENGLISH LABOUR AND TRADE UNIONISM OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY IN THE COVERAGE OF THE BRITISH HISTORIAN G. D. H. COLE

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
T.N. GELLA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
First World

The main purpose of the article is to analyze the views of a famous British historian G.D.G. Cole on the history of the British workers' and UK socialist movement in the early twentieth century. The arti-cle focuses on the historian's assessment and the reasons for the workers' strike movement intensi-fication on the eve of the First World War, the specifics of such trends as labourism, trade unionism and syndicalism.

The Strange Radicalism of Thomas Carnduff and St John Ervine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connal Parr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
First World War ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
Abbey Theatre ◽  
Unpublished Work ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

St John Ervine and Thomas Carnduff were born in working-class Protestant parts of Belfast in the 1880s, though Ervine would escape to an eventually prosperous existence in England. Orangeism, the politics of early twentieth-century Ireland, the militancy of the age—and the involvement of these writers in it—along with Ervine’s journey from ardent Fabian to reactionary Unionist, via his pivotal experiences managing the Abbey Theatre and losing a leg in the First World War, are all discussed. Carnduff’s own tumultuous life is reflected through his complicated Orange affiliation, gut class-consciousness, poetry, unpublished work, contempt for the local (and gentrified) Ulster artistic scene, and veneration of socially conscious United Irishman James Hope. It concludes with an assessment of their respective legacies and continuing import.

Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Shaheen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
First World War ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Prosthetic Devices ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
First World

Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and lesser-known American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War. The war’s mechanized weaponry ushered in an entirely new relationship between organic bodies and the technology that could both cause and attempt to remedy hideous injuries. This relationship was evident in the realm of prosthetic development, which by the second decade of the twentieth century promoted the belief that a prosthesis should be a spiritual extension of the person who possessed it. This spiritualized vision of prostheses held a particular resonance in American postwar culture. Relying on some of the most recent developments in literary and disability studies, the book’s six chapters explain how a prosthesis’s spiritual promise was largely dependent on its ability to nullify an injury and help an amputee renew (or even improve upon) his prewar life. But if it proved too cumbersome, obtrusive, or painful, the device had the long-lasting power to efface or distort his “spirit” or personality.

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