Rebecca West on communism’s allure for the intellectuals: An appraisal

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110533
Author(s):  
Peter Baehr
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Technical Problems ◽  
Political Partisanship

Feminist activist, novelist, literary critic, bio-ethnographer, legal autodidact, and political writer: Rebecca West (1892–1983) was a 20th-century phenomenon. She was also a lifelong critic of communism’s appeal to the intelligentsia. Communism, West claimed, was attractive to three groups of intellectuals outside the Soviet bloc: a minority of scientists who viewed politics as merely a sum of technical problems to solve; the emotionally devastated for whom communism was a means of mental reorientation; and a déclassé segment of the middle class who envisaged communism as a means of material and status advancement. I examine West’s three explanations for communism’s allure, and then proceed to evaluate her account. My assessment is both empirical, using sociological data on American and European communist parties, and methodological, examining the techniques of West’s style, a mix of novelistic empathy and unmasking political partisanship. This mixture I consider fatal because while the novel, like historical interpretation, allows a generous understanding of human agents, unmasking tends towards caricature and denunciation.

scholarly journals Social Picture and Livelihood of the Boatmen in Manik Bandopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi : An Ecocritical Study

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Md. Amir Hossain
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Tidal Waves ◽  
The Poor

According to litterateurs, literature is the reflection of social picture and human life. In this sense, it can be expressed that Ecology, Society, and Life are deeply interconnected each other. With the passage of time, ecological and social life is dealt with literature through which happiness and sorrow, - laughter, sob, and complexity of human life get entangled in a single thread. In the justice of literature, the balance of woe is much more than that of weal in human life. Manik Bandopadhyay was a radical minded litterateur of his times. His treatment of human life and humanity for the poor of the poorest is purely and acutely presented in his literary genres. The core philosophy of human life makes the novelist a universal thinker and legendary figure for all ages. He has observed human life and literature as an essential part of environment. Keeping touch in contact with environment, each and every male and female character of the novelist has enabled to accept the reality of life. Manik’s globally well-reputed novel, Padma Nadir Majhi, is the glaring example of reality of human life. In the context of ecology, this novel is the embodiment of pessimistic attitudes of the middle class society and the subaltern of 20th-century riverine country, like Bangladesh. Kuber, Kopila, and Hossen Miah are the central characters of the whole realistic novel, who are the symbol of reality of life. Thus the writer has apparently presented the pitiable and miserable condition of the boatmen who live very near by the bank of the Mighty Padma. All boatmen have to rely upon the mercy of the Padma; sometimes the mighty river grasps and devours the lives of the poor communities when the tidal waves blow during the rainy season. The 20th-century novelist has unveiled the neglected, helpless, and, above all, the deprived communities of basic human demands as reflected in the novel, Padma Nadir Majhi. In the novel, Manik wants to emphasize upon the fact that nobody comes to write their history. ‘They have to sweat on the dust of the way all the day and night.’—The writer has drawn a grim image of weal and woe, - sniffles and sobs- and sorrow and happiness of the middle class downtrodden people of the age. In fact, he has focused upon the livelihood of boatmen as well as fishermen with his own sympathy and affection with a view to signifying his contemporary social system as well as life-structure of the poor. For life and livelihood, all boatmen have to endure all sorts of complexities of life through living in the darkness of ecology. They hardly hope to see the radiant future of life, because they are victim of environment and circumstance. As a social reformer and an observer of human life, Manik has enabled to find out the environmental perfect image of the boatmen to 21st-century audiences. For this purpose, this study would like to examine social picture, environmental crisis, and complexities of human life in the light of literary judgment. It aims to look at the origin of ecocriticism, the theoretical framework of ecocriticism made by very recent critics and scholars. There is a bond between environment and literature as briefly discussed in this study. It attempts to look at Manik as a social and environmental novelist. Finally, it would like to shed a new light upon 20th-century social picture and livelihood of boatmen and fishermen of the Mighty Padma.

The Right to Dream: Gender, Modernity, and the Problem of Class in Kate O'Brien's Bourgeois Bildungsromane

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Naoise Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
Aristocratic Culture ◽  
Modern Form

Feminist critics have celebrated Kate O'Brien's pioneering approach to gender and sexuality, yet there has been little exploration of her innovations of the coming-of-age narrative. Creating a modern Irish reworking of the Bildungsroman, O'Brien's heroines represent an idealized model of female identity-formation which stands in sharp contrast to the nationalist state's vision of Irish womanhood. Using Franco Moretti's theory of the Bildungsroman, a framing of the genre as a thoroughly ‘modern’ form of the novel, this article applies a critical Marxist lens to O'Brien's output. This reading brings to light the ways in which the limitations of the Bildungsroman work to constrain O'Brien's subversive politics. Their middle-class status remains an integral part of the identity of her heroines, informing the forms of liberation they seek. Fundamentally, O'Brien's idealization of aristocratic culture, elitist exceptionalism and ‘detachment of spirit’ restricts the emancipatory potential of her vision of Irish womanhood.

Die Spur des Stoffs. Ermittlungsrausch in Friedrich Glausers Die Fieberkurve

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Mareike Schildmann
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Logical Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conservative Approach ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
The 19Th Century

Abstract This article traces some of the fundamental poetological changes that the traditional crime novel undergoes in the work of the Swiss author Friedrich Glauser at the beginning of the 20th century. The rational-analytical, conservative approach of the criminal novel in the 19th century implied – according to Luc Boltanski – the separation of an epistemologically structured, institutionalized order of “reality” and a chaotic, unruly, unformatted “world” – a separation that is questioned, but reestablished in the dramaturgy of crime and its resolution. By shifting the attention from the logical structure of ‘whodunnit’ to the sensual material culture and “atmosphere” that surrounds actions and people, Glauser’s novels blur these epistemological and ontological boundaries. The article shows how in Die Fieberkurve, the second novel of Glauser’s famous Wachtmeister Studer-series, material and sensual substances develop a specific, powerful dynamic that dissipates, complicates, crosslinks, and confuses the objects and acts of investigation as well as its narration. The material spoors, dust, fibers, fingerprints, intoxicants and natural resources like oil and gas – which lead the investigation from Switzerland to North Africa – trigger a new sensual mode of perception and reception that replaces the reassuring criminological ideal of solution by the logic of “dissolution”. The novel thereby demonstrates the poetic impact of the slogan of modernity: matter matters.

,,Er hätte am liebsten ununterbrochen gespielt“. : Schach in Elias Canettis Roman ,,Die Blendung“

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 649-661
Author(s):  
Carl Philipp Roth
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Chess Player ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Strategic Skills

Abstract Der Beitrag untersucht die Bedeutung des Schachspiels in Elias Canettis Roman Die Blendung zum einen auf der Ebene der historischen und sozialen Kontexte, in denen der Schachspieler Siegfried Fischer im Wien des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts steht. Er fokussiert zum anderen die Bedeutung des Schachspiels auf Handlungsebene. Denn Siegfried Fischer – genannt Fischerle – überträgt seine strategischen Fähigkeiten im Schach auf die ihn umgebende Welt und bringt so Peter Kien ,Zug um Zug‘ um dessen Reichtum.The article examines the significance of chess in Elias Canetti’s novel Die Blendung in the historical and social context of early 20th century Vienna. It further focuses on the function of chess within the novel: The actor and chess player Siegfried Fischer – called Fischerle – transfers his strategic skills from chess to his surroundings, thus depriving Peter Kien of his wealth ‘move by move’.

The Limit Situation And The Narrative Of War (On The Material Of The Novel “My Lieutenant” By Daniil Granin)

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-104
Author(s):  
Anatoly S. Kuprin ◽  
Galina I. Danilina
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Continuous Limit ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Term Limit ◽  
Abstract Author ◽  
The Third ◽  
Definition Of

The purpose of this study is the analysis of limit situation in the narrative of war. The material of the study is the novel of Daniil Granin “My Lieutenant” and related texts. In the first part of the paper, the authors explore existing approaches to the term “limit situation” and similar concepts into scientific and philosophical traditions; limits of its applicability in literary studies and its relation to the categories of “narrative instances” and “event”. Proposed a literary-theoretical definition of the limit situation, which can be used in the analysis of fiction texts. Existing approaches to the examination of the situation of war are analyzed: philosophical-existential, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary. In the second part of the paper, the authors propose their method for analyzing limit situations in texts about war, which basis on existing approaches and preserves the text-centric principle of studying the structure of the story. Two interrelated areas of research have been identified: the study of war as a continuous limit situation in the intertextual aspect (the discourse of war); the study of limit situations (death, suffering, guilt, accident) in the narrative of war as part of a specific text. In the third part of the scientific work,the analysis of war as a continuous limit situation results in the study of the concept of “limit” (border) in a fiction text. The role of “limit” (border) concept in the texts about the war is studied, the possible types of limits in the discourse of war are examined. Limit situations in the narrative of war are analyzed on the basis of the novel “My Lieutenant” by Daniil Granin. A review of journalistic and scientific works about the novel revealed both the continuity and the differences between the novel and the “lieutenant” prose of the 20th century. An analysis of the limit situations in the novel revealed their key position in the narrative. These situations are independent of the fiction time, of the fluctuation of the point of view’; the function of the abstract author is to build the narrative as a “directive” immersion of the hero and narrator in these situations.

Agnes Grey

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Brontë ◽  
Sally Shuttleworth
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Anne Bronte ◽  
Agnes Grey

‘How delightful it would be to be a governess!’ When the young Agnes Grey takes up her first post as governess she is full of hope; she believes she only has to remember ‘myself at their age’ to win her pupils’ love and trust. Instead she finds the young children she has to deal with completely unmanageable. They are, as she observes to her mother, ‘unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures’. In writing her first novel, Anne Brontë drew on her own experiences, and one can trace in the work many of the trials of the Victorian governess, often stranded far from home, and treated with little respect by her employers, yet expected to control and educate her young charges. Agnes Grey looks at childhood from nursery to adolescence, and it also charts the frustrations of romantic love, as Agnes starts to nurse warmer feelings towards the local curate, Mr Weston. The novel combines astute dissection of middle-class social behaviour and class attitudes with a wonderful study of Victorian responses to young children which has parallels with debates about education that continue to this day.

North and South

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Sally Shuttleworth
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Authority ◽  
Industrial Town ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
And Gender ◽  
North And South ◽  
Obedience To Authority

`She tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.’ North and South is a novel about rebellion. Moving from the industrial riots of discontented millworkers through to the unsought passions of a middle-class woman, and from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny, it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the conflict between Margaret’s ready sympathy with the workers and her growing attraction to the charismatic mill ownder, John Thornton. This new revised and expanded edition sets the novel in the context of Victorian social and medical debate.

The Novel Theology of H. G. Wells

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-123
Author(s):  
Stuart Bell
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
The Novel ◽  
British Army ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
The Way

Abstract “Lambeth Palace is my Washpot. Over Fulham have I cast my breeches.” So declared the novelist and secularist H. G. Wells in a letter to his mistress, Rebecca West, in May 1917. His claim was that, because of him, Britain was “full of theological discussion” and theological books were “selling like hot cakes”. He was lunching with liberal churchmen and dining with bishops. Certainly, the first of the books published during Wells’s short “religious period”, the novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through, had sold very well on both sides of the Atlantic and made Wells financially secure. Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (“Woodbine Willie”) wrote that, “Everyone ought to read Mr. H. G. Wells’s great novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through. It is a gallant and illuminating attempt to state the question, and to answer it. His thought has brought him to a very real and living faith in God revealed in Jesus Christ, and has also brought relief to many troubled minds among the officers of the British Army.” Yet, Wells’s God was explicitly a finite God, and his theology was far from orthodox. How can we account for his boast and for the clerical affirmation which he certainly did receive? This article examines and re-evaluates previous accounts of the responses of clergy to Wells’s writing, correcting some narratives. It discusses the way in which many clergy used Mr. Britling as a means by which to engage in a populist way with the question of theodicy, and examines the letters which Wells received from several prominent clerics, locating their responses in the context of their own theological writings. This is shown to be key to understanding the reaction of writers such as Studdert Kennedy to Mr. Britling Sees It Through. Finally, an assessment is made of the veracity of Wells’s boasting to his mistress, concluding that his claims were somewhat exaggerated. “Lambeth Palace is my Washpot, Over Fulham have I cast my breeches.” Mit diesen Worten erklärte der literarisch außergewöhnlich erfolgreiche und entschieden säkular denkende, kirchenkritische Schriftsteller und Science-Fiction-Pionier Herbert George Wells seiner Geliebten, dass seinetwegen Großbritannien “full of theological discussion” sei. Nicht ohne Eitelkeit schrieb er es seinem im September 1916 mit Blick auf den Krieg geschriebenen und stark autobiographisch gefärbten Roman Mr. Britling Sees it Through von knapp 450 Seiten zu, dass theologische Bücher reißenden Absatz fänden. Auch war er stolz darauf, liberale Kleriker zum Lunch zu treffen und von Bischöfen zum abendlichen Dinner eingeladen zu werden. In einer kurzen Phase seines Lebens war – oder inszenierte sich – Wells als ein frommer, gläubiger Mensch. Sein damals veröffentlichter Roman Mr. Britling Sees It Through verkaufte sich sowohl in Nordamerika als auch im Heimatland so gut, dass der Autor nun definitiv finanziell gesichert war. Der anglikanische Priester und Dichter Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, der im Ersten Weltkrieg Woodbine Willie genannt wurde, weil er verletzten und sterbenden Soldaten in den Phasen der Vorbereitung auf den Tod Woodbine-Zigaretten anbot, empfahl die Lektüre von Wells’ “great novel” Mr. Britling mit den Worten: “It is a gallant and illuminating attempt to state the question, and to answer it. His thought has brought him to a very real and living faith in God revealed in Jesus Christ, and has also brought relief to many troubled minds among the officers of the British Army.” Allerdings war H. G. Wells’ Gott ein durchaus endlicher Gott, und seine Theologie war alles andere als orthodox. Wie lassen sich dennoch seine evidente Prahlerei und die emphatische Zustimmung zu seinem Roman in den britischen Klerikereliten erklären? Im Aufsatz werden zunächst einige ältere Deutungen der Zustimmung führender Kleriker zu Wells’ Roman untersucht und einige der dabei leitenden Deutungsmuster kritisch infrage gestellt. Deutlich wird, dass nicht wenige anglikanische Geistliche Mr. Britling dazu nutzten, um höchst populistisch das umstrittene Theodizeeproblem anzusprechen. Auch werden die Briefe prominenter Geistlicher an Wells analysiert, mit Blick auf ihre eigenen Publikationen. Diese Reaktionen haben stark Studdert Kennedys Haltung zu Mr. Britling Sees It Through beeinflusst. Besonders aufrichtig war Wells mit Blick auf sich selbst allerdings nicht. Die Selbstinszenierung gegenüber seiner Geliebten war einfach nur peinliche Übertreibung.

scholarly journals Place matters: geographical context, place belonging and the production of locality in Mediterranean Noirs

GeoJournal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Gabellieri
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Geographical Discourse ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Narrative Medium ◽  
Geographical Context

AbstractScholars have been investigating detective stories and crime fiction mostly as literary works reflecting the societies that produced them and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. However, these genres have generally been neglected by literary geographers. In the attempt to fill such an epistemological vacuum, this paper examines and compare the function and importance of geography in both classic and late 20th century detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s detective stories are compared to Mediterranean noir books by Manuel Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean Claude Izzo. While space is shown to be at the center of the investigations in the former two authors, the latter rather focus on place, that is space invested by the authors with meaning and feelings of identity and belonging. From this perspective, the article argues that detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer’s representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the emerging role of place in some of the later popular crime fiction can be interpreted as the result of writer’s sentiment of belonging and, according to Appadurai’s theory, as a literary and geographical discourse aimed at the production of locality.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

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