Anglophone Literature, Its Critics, and the Left: An Introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-224
Author(s):  
Peter Kalliney
Keyword(s):  
Anglophone Literature

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).

Flat Style: Things Fall Apart and Its Illustrations

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Hyde
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Early Publication ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Things Fall Apart

In the early 1960s two editions of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart were published with competing sets of illustrations. The first, by Dennis Carabine, illustrates a realist novel, the second, by Uche Okeke, a modernist one. Reading Achebe's iconic novel through its early publication history and for its visual images shows how the famous ending of Things Fall Apart turns, stylistically, to the impenetrable flatness of the modernist surface. At mid-century, modernist style could be made to serve realist imperatives, and Achebe's flat style challenges colonial modes of literary representation and the myth of modernist primitivism in the visual arts. This essay stresses the importance of the visual image to mid-century anglophone literature and the importance of modernist style to the poetics of decolonization.

The Booker Prize and Post-Imperial British Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Holmes
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Commonwealth Of Nations ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
British Colonies

In the particular and peculiar case of the Booker Prize, regarded as the most prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom (as measured by economic value to the author and publisher, and total audience for the awards announcement), the cultural and economic valences of literary prizes collide with the imperial history of Britain, and its after-empire relationships to its former colonies. From its beginnings, the Booker prize has never been simply a British prize for writers in the United Kingdom. The Booker’s reach into the Commonwealth of Nations, a loose cultural and economic alliance of the United Kingdom and former British colonies, challenges the very constitution of the category of post-imperial British literature. With a history of winners from India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Nigeria, among many other former British colonies, the Booker presents itself as a value arbitrating mechanism for a majority of the English-speaking world. Indeed, the Booker has maintained a reputation for bringing writers from postcolonial nations to the attention of a British audience increasingly hungry for a global, cosmopolitan literature, especially one easily available via the lingua franca of English. Whether and how the prize winners avoid the twin colonial pitfalls of ownership by and debt to an English patron is the subject of a great deal of criticism on the Booker, and to understand the prize as a gatekeeper and tastemaker for the loose, baggy canon of British or even global Anglophone literature, there must be a reckoning with the history of the prize, its multiplication into several prizes under one umbrella category, and the form and substance of the novels that have taken the prize since 1969.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

‘All the world’s a stage’ – Shakespeare in English Language Education

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Education ◽  
English Language Education ◽  
Teaching Literature ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Anglophone Literature

If asked about which writer they associate with Anglophone literature, most students might come up with William Shakespeare, who has also become an integral part of British cultural identity. As a matter of fact, his works keep delighting audiences worldwide. However, EFL learners might struggle with the complexity and ambiguity of his plays and poetry. This anthology provides perspectives of how to read and teach Shakespeare. Thereby, it focusses on a variety of texts worth implementing in teaching units. The articles take the perspective of literary and cultural studies as base and aim at interconnecting it to major con-cepts and theories of teaching literature and culture and provides ideas of how to actively teach Shakespeare in class. With contributions by Alina Dresen, Julia Falter, Jessie-May Franken, Sophie Gnech, Svenja Harzem, Michelle Hausschild, Christina Kattwinkel, Ruth Kühsel, Dr. Imke Lichterfeld, Milena Niesen, Rahel Ovesiek, Daniel Schönbauer, Alina Tary, Sofia Ullah, Daniel Voges und Bernadette von Tongelen.

‘Parasitic publishers’? Tauchnitz, Albatross and the Continental Diffusion of Anglophone Modernism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lise Jaillant
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Early Relationship ◽  
German Publisher ◽  
Mainstream Culture

In 1933, Ezra Pound deplored modernism’s transition from “small honest magazines” to large-scale publishing houses. He described Tauchnitz and Albatross as “parasitic publishers,” eager to exploit James Joyce’s fame to make money. But this story leaves aside a central element: the fact that Joyce and Pound had eagerly courted publishers of cheap editions. Only when the interest of these publishers was no longer in doubt did Pound dismiss them as parasites eager to cash in on the growing popularity of modernism. This chapter is organised chronologically, starting with Joyce’s early relationship with Tauchnitz. It shows that the transnational nature of Tauchnitz, a German publisher of Anglophone literature, particularly appealed to expatriate modernists such as Joyce. The chapter then turns to the period from 1929 to 1932, at the time when Max Christian Wegner was manager-in-chief of Tauchnitz and attempted to modernise the company before co-founding Albatross. Wegner understood that titles by Joyce, Woolf and Lewis could appeal to a wide audience in Europe. The last section is on Albatross, a publisher that not only helped to popularise modernist texts, but was also shaped by the modernist movement. Its stylish covers and intrinsic cosmopolitanism exemplify modernism’s growing influence on mainstream culture in the 1930s.

Aftermath

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Rowley-Conwy
Keyword(s):  
Stage Theory ◽  
Archaeological Theory ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Academic Context ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
Physical Evidence ◽  
System A ◽  
History Of

We have followed the story of the Three Age System a very long way indeed. We saw how it emerged in Copenhagen and Lund, how it was received there, and how Worsaae fought to establish it there. We then saw how it came to Britain, and followed in Worsaae’s footsteps from London to Edinburgh to Dublin and back to London again. In each of the three capitals in which it was considered, accepted or rejected, the academic context was quite different from the others. In London the archaeologists were safe sheltering under the dominant ethnological paradigm, and for some time saw no reason to venture out from beneath it. In Edinburgh the Four Stage Theory and long links with Denmark made the Scandinavian story much easier to swallow rapidly. In Dublin the historical elite was so blinded by the glory of their ancient history that there was no place for the archaeological theory, and it had to be carried into the capital by an originally provincial archaeological movement. Back in London, the safe ethnological chronology was jolted out of alignment by the discovery of human antiquity, and alongside this—and on the back of high-quality archaeological excavation—the Three Age System finally won the day. Some aspects of the story have long been well known. The roles of C. J. Thomsen, of J. J. A. Worsaae, of Daniel Wilson, and of John Lubbock have all received much exposure in discussions of the history of archaeology. But in following this story we have also sometimes looked beneath stones that have seldom if ever previously been lifted in this connection, at least in the Anglophone literature. It has for example rarely been understood that Thomsen’s ‘idea of prehistory’ was not simply forging back into hitherto uncharted chronological territory, but was to begin with leaning on the elaborate ancient historical structure of Peter Frederik Suhm. It was only when Christian Molbech kicked away this structure in the 1830s that the Three Age System had to stand on its own. Fortunately it was rapidly supported by three other chronologies employing physical evidence, and they acted as supports in its very earliest days of independence. When Worsaae hastened ancient history into its grave in the 1840s, the Three Age System was therefore able to stand on its own four feet (archaeology, economy, ecology, and craniology).

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