‘The sweet tang of rape’: Torture, survival and masculinity in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Adams
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Literary Meaning ◽  
Second World ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the torture scenes in Ian Fleming’s canon of Bond novels and short stories (1953–1966), despite the fact that they represent some of the most potent sites of the negotiations of masculinity, nationhood, violence and the body for which Fleming’s texts are critically renowned. This article is an intersectional feminist reading of Fleming’s canon, which stresses the interpenetrations of homophobia, anticommunism and misogyny that are present in Fleming’s representation of torture. Drawing on close readings of Fleming’s novels and theoretical discussions of heteronormativity, homophobia and national identity, this article argues that Fleming’s representations of torture are sites of literary meaning in which the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity are policed and reinforced. This policing is achieved, this article argues, through the associations of the perpetration of torture with homosexuality and Communism, and the survival of torture with post-imperial British hegemonic masculinity. Fleming’s torture scenes frequently represent set pieces in which Bond must reject or endure the unsolicited intimacy of other men; he must resist their seductions and persuasions and remain ideologically undefiled. Bond’s survival of torture is a metonymy for Britain’s survival of post-Second World War social and political upheaval. Further, the horror of torture, for Fleming, is the horror of a hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity in disarray: Bond’s survival represents the regrounding of normative heterosexual masculinity through the rejection of homosexuality and Communism.

scholarly journals VOCABULARY OF THE COLLECTION OF NOVELS BY YU. M. MUSHKETIK «GREEN RYE»

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (193) ◽  
pp. 343-347
Author(s):  
Olena Ilina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Times ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
Second World ◽  
Linguistic Means

Ukrainian literature is famous for a lot of creative personalities who are the spiritual and moral leaders of the nation. Their work is designed to awake the highest values, national identity in each person. The article provides information about the vocabulary of a collection of short stories by the outstanding Ukrainian master of words Yu. M. Mushketyk. It is emphasized that the author uses the expression of colloquial vocabulary, as well as outdated vocabulary, introduces dialectisms and professionalisms into the text, mostly in order to create the appropriate color, give the character or terrain relief. Thematic groups of archaisms, historicisms, dialectisms are singled out, the artistic role of individual author's innovations is clarified. The master of the word appeals in works to the time of Antiquity, writes about the times of Kievan Rus, describes Koliivshchyna, the Second World War, and he also writes about the present. Yu. M. Mushketyk can be considered as an artist of philosophical depth. The main topics to which the author appeals are the connection of the historical past with the present, war, the problem of choice, the formation of national identity, the unity of Ukrainian lands, the formation of a harmonious personality, and so on. The author does not hide his position, his likes or dislikes. The writer’s opinion is expressed either directly or it follows from the very concept of the literary text. The main linguistic means used by the writer include the use of outdated vocabulary (historicisms and archaisms), the introduction into the text of individual authorial phraseology.

The Motif of Sacrifice in the Literature and Culture of the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Rawlinson
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

This chapter explores how Anglophone literature and culture envisioned and questioned an economy of sacrificial exchange, particularly its symbolic aspect, as driving the compulsions entangled in the Second World War. After considering how Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories cast light on the Home Front rhetorics of sacrifice and reconstruction, it looks at how poets Robert Graves, Keith Douglas, and Alun Lewis reflect on First World War poetry of sacrifice. With reference to René Girard’s and Carl von Clausewitz’s writings on war, I take up Elaine Cobley’s assertion about the differing valencies of the First and Second World Wars, arguing that the contrast is better seen in terms of sacrificial economy. I develop that argument with reference to examples from Second World War literature depicting sacrificial exchange (while often harking back to the First World War), including Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61), and William Wharton’s memoir Shrapnel (2012).

Alien Internment in John Galsworthy’s ‘The Bright Side’ and ‘The Dog It was that Died’

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Jill Felicity Durey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Internment Camp ◽  
Bright Side ◽  
Second World ◽  
John Galsworthy

This article illuminates two short stories by John Galsworthy through examining them with the help of his diaries and letters, a handful of unpublished letters by his nephew from an internment camp and secondary historical sources. It argues that the stories, when read in conjunction with these sources, are highly revealing about human nature during Second World War and also about Galsworthy’s prescient fears concerning a second twentieth-century world war, which he did not live to see.

scholarly journals Britishness and otherness: Representing and constructing identity in BBC’s Land Girls

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-105
Author(s):  
Bonnie White
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World

This article situates Land Girls (BBC, 2009–2011) in dialogue with the Second World War and its legacy. Although the series ostensibly deals with the experience of British Land Girls during the war in a melodramatic way, Land Girls is best understood as an anxious commentary on the place of Britain and its cultural institutions following the war. The series uses national, racial and economic others in order to de-romanticise notions of a collective national identity, while simultaneously using those others to help articulate an idealised sense of Britishness for a 21st-century audience.

Democracy and Dictatorship in the Cold War: the Two Germanies, 1949–1961

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
German States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The ‘long 1950s’ was a decade of conspicuous contrasts: a time of dismantling and reconstruction, economic and political, as well as cultural and moral; a time of Americanization and Sovietization; a time of upheaval amid a desperate search for stability. But above all, it was a time for both forgetting and coming to terms with the recent past. This article focuses on the two forms of government that controlled Germany, democracy, and dictatorship. The Cold War was without doubt the main reason for the rapid rehabilitation and integration of the two German states, which more or less took place within a decade following the end of the Second World War. This article further elaborates upon the political conditions under dictatorship and its effect on the social life. East Germany, under the Soviet control underwent as much political upheaval. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Germany became a democracy.

The Wider Subjectivities of Men in Reserved Occupations in Wartime Glasgow and Clydeside

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Chand
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
National Level ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Social Activities ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Everyday Living

This chapter analyses the narratives of men who worked in reserved occupations in Clydeside to explore wider aspects of their individual subjectivities other than gender. Areas of subjectivity examined include national identity (picking up from the discussion in Chapter 3 and looking at men of non-British or Scottish nationality), class consciousness and political identity, religion and social activities. This chapter widens the picture of how men in reserved occupations experienced the war, arguing that male reserved workers were aware of ‘imagined’ collective subjectivity on a national level, and that important similarities existed between the subjectivities of men who worked in different regions of Britain, particularly those with higher proportions of men working in reserved occupations. The chapter re-enforces the notion that the subjectivities of such men existed on different levels and reflected to varying degrees the concepts of ‘imagination’ and ‘living’, making clear that the subjectivities of male civilian workers in wartime Clydeside comprised different national, ethnic, religious, class and political attributes, all integral and important to reserved men before, during and after the Second World War. Arguably, however, men were often aware of these integral aspects of their subjectivities on an ‘imagined’ level, and many aspects of them were superseded by a pre-occupation with everyday living, also continuous and fundamentally unchanged by wartime. In arguing for the continuity of different ‘imagined’ and ‘lived’ forms of subjectivity among men in reserved occupations in wartime Clydeside, this chapter re-enforces the notion that, although integral to masculinity, temporary wartime ideals did not fundamentally change the masculine subjectivities of male civilian workers.

The Body of Extraterritoriality

2019 ◽  
pp. 238-267
Author(s):  
Victor Fan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World War ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Second World

This book’s conclusion revisits what extraterritoriality means and the historical journey of different generations of filmmakers and spectators who tried to work through this problem by creating, theorising, defining, and defending Hong Kong cinema, television, and media. The end of the previous chapter suggests that humanism is perhaps the answer to our political impasse. However, the mode of humanism that was widely promulgated by politicians and artists during and immediately after the Second World War (1939–45) had already failed and it turned out to be the beginning of the problematics that have produced the precarious milieu in which we live. This conclusion therefore proposes that we revisit what it means by being human while living with other human beings, by not re-territorialising any place or anybody, but by giving extraterritoriality a presence, a body. It argues that in Hong Kong, Mainland filmmakers who were exiled from their homeland use their films to explore and negotiate the means by which one can reclaim humanity.

Meglio di ieri

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90
Author(s):  
Anne Bruch
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civic Education ◽  
Public Information ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Italian Government ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Educational Films ◽  
Second World

This article examines a series of educational films and documentaries produced between 1948 and 1968 that document the activities of the Italian state. These films, which record the dedicated and arduous work of the Italian government and administration, had two functions. First, they informed students and the general public about the democratic structures, institutions and aims of the new republic, promoting a fresh and convincing vision of national identity. Second, they served to obscure and rewrite the collective national memory of Fascism and Italian involvement in the Second World War. These films thus reveal the fine line between public information, political propaganda, and civic education.

Policing, Ill-Discipline, and Crime in the American–Australian Alliance, 1942–1945

2019 ◽  
pp. 096834451985838
Author(s):  
Liam Kane
Keyword(s):  
New Guinea ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Second World ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This article analyses policing, ill-discipline, and crime in the Australian–American alliance during the Second World War. Though these topics have received considerable scholarly attention, previous studies have been narrowly focused both geographically and thematically. Providing a broad analysis of these subjects, this article places these issues within their wider political and legal context, and examines the nature of cooperation between Australian police (both military and civil) and their US allies. It also traces general patterns of ill-discipline and crime in Australia and its territory of Papua and mandate of New Guinea, highlighting policies that successfully limited inter-Allied violence.

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