Social memory and battle names: Exploring links between travel, memory and the media

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 242-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Winter
Keyword(s):  
Social Memory ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Great War ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Great War

The profile of five battles fought by Australians in the Great War (1914–1918) was traced over the past century using the frequency by which they were cited in the popular media. The pattern of these frequencies appeared to remain much the same from 1915 until the 1990s with battles involving very large numbers of casualties at Pozières and Passchendaele having a higher media frequency than smaller battles at Fromelles and Villers-Bretonneux. Gallipoli's status as Australia's best known battlefield has been consistent from 1915 until the present day. Over the past decade however, the media frequencies suggest that there has been a re-prioritization in the importance of these five battles. The discovery of lost graves at Fromelles and the introduction of a Dawn Service at Villers-Bretonneux has elevated the importance of these two sites, with the result that tourist visitation to them has also increased.

scholarly journals “Prefer not, eh?”: Re-Scribing the Lives of the Great War Poets in Contemporary British Historical Fiction

2018 ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
María Cristina Pividori
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Great War ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Past ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Post War ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War

Although the First World War has become history by now, the memory of the war continues to be repeatedly fictionalised: retrospectively inspired narratives are often regarded as more genuine and far-reaching than historical or documentary accounts in their rendition of the past. Yet, memory is creatively selective, reflecting a highly-conflicted process of sifting and discerning what should be remembered, neglected or amplified from the stream of war experience. In his book about Pat Barker, Mark Rawlinson argues that “historical fiction has been transformed in the post-war period by the way writers have exploited the porous and unstable demarcation between fiction and no fiction, stories and history” (14). Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover (2009), Geoff Akers’s Beating for the Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg (2006) and Robert Edric’s In Zodiac Light (2008) have not become best sellers like Barker’s Regeneration trilogy; yet, they too represent the predominant commemorative drift in contemporary British fiction about the Great War. Without doubt, these three authors have followed in Barker’s steps in their purpose of holding a mirror to real people and real events in the past and of deciphering the deleted text of ‘the war to end all wars.’ However, while Barker chose to write about the often-anthologised Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dawson, Akers and Edric base their narratives on the writings, and lives, of Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney respectively. My discussion of these three novels will explore the various ways in which the past can be accessed and interpreted from the present and represented in fiction. The authors’ decisions as to what historical instances to unravel do not just reveal the relation that contemporary British fiction entertains with the Great War and with history, but also how the past erupts in the present to interrogate it. Taking three salient features of Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (1988)—intertextuality, parody and paratextuality—as my theoretical points of departure, I will explore the dominant frameworks and cultural conditions (that is the propagation of either patriotic or protest readings) within which the Great War has been narrated in the novels and the new approaches, opportunities and ethical implications of using historical and literary sources to re-scribe a previously non-existent version of the lives of the iconic Great War Poets.

Houses as Lieux de Mémoire in Margery Allingham’s Crime Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-233
Author(s):  
Renáta Zsámba
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Great War ◽  
Country House ◽  
Family Secrets ◽  
The Past ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Great War

This article discusses the house as a site of memory in the novels of Margery Allingham, where it embodies a tension between the past and the present that turns the domestic milieu into a place of horror. Stemming from Susan Rowland’s claim that Golden Age authors did not write ‘unproblematically conservative country house mysteries’ (43), this paper uses Svetlana Boym’s theory of restorative and reflective nostalgia and Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) to read Allingham’s novels, which critically observe the sustainment of a vision of the past after the Great War. In her work, country houses like the eponymous one in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), are, despite their aristocratic grandeur, perfect scenes for murder. While the countryside is associated with a nostalgic innocence, it is also contaminated by the intrusion of the present, as in Sweet Danger (1933). Family secrets are also reasons for crime, as we see in Police at the Funeral (1931). Hide My Eyes (1958) relocates the nostalgic atmosphere to a suburban house converted into a museum of ‘curios’, which operates as an ironic allegory of a nation wrapped up in its own history.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Identity ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.

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.

scholarly journals Inspiration of Astronomy in the Movies: a History of a Close Encounter

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (1 and 2) ◽  
pp. 357-371
Author(s):  
Beatriz García ◽  
Estela Reynoso ◽  
Silvina Pérez Alvarez ◽  
Raúl Gabellone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Science History ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Media

The connection between astronomy and an independent, widespread cultural expression like cinematography is of particular interest within the context of the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena. Astronomy has caught the interest of the seventh art since its birth, early in the twentieth century. In this paper we go through a collection of movies that reveal how astronomy and astronomers are perceived by society. We notice the influence of the progress achieved in astronautics in the second half of the past century, and how interplanetary or even intergalactic travels have become a recurrent issue. In many cases, astronomical facts are rigorously treated, but several other times, serious mistakes are transmitted. Biographical movies based on astronomical celebrities are rare, but some are masterpieces, like Giordano Bruno by Giuliano Montaldo, or Galileo Galilei by Liliana Cavani. In this sense the astronomers, as main characters in cinema, support the idea of the scientist as everyman, connected with life and, in many cases, with a sense of social responsibility. From the analysis of more than a hundred movies, we can see that this particular manifestation of art, which involves science and technology, can be used not only to reproduce astronomical events, transmit a message or reproduce a particular epoch of science history, but also to teach, to develop a critical faculty when faced with information from the media, and to show that astronomical facts can be as interesting, relevant, dramatic, happy or funny as real life.

scholarly journals The First World War and its Legacy in the Middle East

2016 ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Eugene Rogan
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
First World War ◽  
Past Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

The First World War proved a crucial turning point in the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. Under conditions of total warfare, conscripts and civilians suffered greater losses and depredations than in any other conflict in the region before or since. The Great War also led to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after four centuries of rule over the Arab lands, to be replaced by a modern state system actively negotiated between the Entente Powers in the course of the war. While the borders of Middle Eastern states have proven remarkably enduring over the past century, so too have the problems engendered by the wartime partition diplomacy.

The Battle for the Irrational

2019 ◽  
pp. 36-87
Author(s):  
Renaud Gagné ◽  
For Albert Henrichs
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
Belle Epoque ◽  
Greek Religion ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Foundations ◽  
Ancient Religion ◽  
Belle Époque ◽  
The Great War

This chapter examines how the historiography of Greek religion renewed itself between 1920 and 1950. This period invested a great deal of effort in the answers that could be sought from the celebrated old sources. As the former certainties were battered from all sides, the revered voices from the past often resonated with the intensity of a battle call for renewal. Greek religion, one of the most contested domains in the reception of ancient culture, was to be solicited again and again to help imagine a new future. The chapter then considers the great changes that saw the Belle Époque study of ancient religion thoroughly transformed after the Great War, and the stakes of some of the fundamental disagreements that set influential scholars of the Interwar years against each other. Ultimately, the battle for the Greek Irrational was a search for the new foundations of modernity.

Imagining Ithaca

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Wizard Of Oz ◽  
Woody Allen ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The World ◽  
Returning Home ◽  
The Great War

‘Though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one’, said Charles Dickens, ‘stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.’ The ancient Greek word nostos, meaning homecoming or return, has a commensurate power and mystique. Irish philosopher-poet John Moriarty described it as ‘a teeming word … a haunted word … a word to conjure with’. The most celebrated and culturally enduring nostos is that of Homer’s Odysseus who spent ten years returning home after the fall of Troy. His journey back involved many obstacles, temptations, and fantastical adventures and even a katabasis, a rare descent by the living into the realm of the dead. All the while he was sustained and propelled by his memories of Ithaca (‘His native home deep imag’d in his soul’, as Pope’s translation has it). From Virgil’s Aeneid to James Joyce’s Ulysses, from MGM’s The Wizard of Oz to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and from Derek Walcott’s Omeros to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and nostalgia has been continually summoned and reimagined by writers and filmmakers. At the same time, ‘Ithaca’ has proved to be an evocative and versatile abstraction. It is as much about possibility as it is about the past; it is a vision of Arcadia or a haunting, an object of longing, a repository of memory, ‘a sleep and a forgetting’. In essence it is about seeking what is absent. Imagining Ithaca explores the idea of nostos, and its attendant pain (algos), in an excitingly eclectic range of sources: from Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, through the exilic memoirs of Nabokov and the time-travelling fantasies of Woody Allen, to Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian descent into the London Underground and Michael Portillo’s Telemachan railway journey to Salamanca. This kaleidoscopic exploration spans the end of the Great War, when the world at large was experiencing the complexities of homecoming, to the era of Brexit and COVID-19 which has put the notion of nostalgia firmly under the microscope.

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