‘A certain amount of instruction’: Politics, entertainment and narration in the interwar short stories of Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Naomi Mitchison

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-112
Author(s):  
Chris Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Sylvia Townsend Warner

scholarly journals My Shirt Is in Mexico

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Voluntary Service ◽  
Sylvia Townsend Warner ◽  
Civil Defence ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Village ◽  
Second World

Sylvia Townsend Warner lived for nearly half her life in Maiden Newton. Surprisingly, since she was a Communist, and Maiden Newton was a working-class village, she showed little interest in its people. During the Second World War, however, she inevitably became more involved with them. ‘Miss Warner’ was a driving force in the Women’s Voluntary Service in Dorchester, and in Maiden Newton’s Civil Defence. Almost all of her short stories about the village date from this chaotic and unpredictable period. They provide a rich source of material about the village’s Home Front, and show Warner’s attitude to it all: a mix of amusement, pity and resignation which combine to make some very fine stories.

‘J’ai mon silence’: The interrelations of sound, voice and silence in three short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
David Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Breaking Wave ◽  
Sylvia Townsend Warner ◽  
Voice And Silence

The interrelations of sound, voice and silence in three realist short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner from the 1940s are discussed. The stories are ‘The Proper Circumstances’, ‘The Mother Tongue’ and ‘A Breaking Wave’, all published in the posthumous collection One Thing Leading to Another (1984). Warner is shown to be deeply attuned to sound and its absence in her short fiction; these motifs are integrated with other aspects of setting and with character and narration. Both sound in the text and sound of the text are of semantic importance in her work. Warner’s presentation of silence as a source of power is remarkable, silence being usually configured as lack of agency. Warner’s deployment of silence is related to her status as a lesbian writer.

Warner, Sylvia Townsend (1893–1978)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Suh
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
International Association ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
The Other ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Sylvia Townsend Warner ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Lifelong Partner

Sylvia Townsend Warner was the author of novels, short stories, poetry, journalistic non-fiction, and literary criticism. Her works often inhabit settings at opposite ends of the modernist-era spectrum: on one hand, fantasy and fable worlds, and on the other, detailed contemporary domestic and historical settings incorporating themes of war, revolution, and class struggle. Warner is regarded as a pioneer of anti-colonial, LGBT, Marxist, and anti-fascist narrative, particularly in her novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Warner was born and raised in Harrow, Middlesex, England, where her father was schoolmaster at the boys’ public school. She resided in London between 1917 and 1927 to work as a musicologist and editor on the Carnegie UK Trust’s Tudor Church Music Research Project. In 1926, she met her lifelong partner, Valentine Ackland, a poet and writer in her own right, and in 1930 they moved in with each other in Dorset. Both women were committed leftist activists who joined the Communist Party in 1935. In the year, Warner joined the Executive Committee of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture (IAWDC), and in 1936, she served as Secretary of the Association of Writers for Intellectual Liberty (AWIL); both were anti-fascist organisations. During the war, Warner wrote anti-fascist and Marxist articles for leftist newspapers and magazines, including Time and Tide, the Left Review, the Daily Worker, and Our Time.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maud Ellmann
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Sylvia Townsend Warner ◽  
Stark Contrast ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Critical Writings

This article reviews some important recent contributions to the belated recovery of the work of English novelist and poet Sylvia Townsend Warner. Described by Eleanor Perényi as “feminist, Marxist, historical novelist, social comedian, teller of fairy tales,” Warner has received scant critical attention, in stark contrast to her remarkable productivity. Warner published thirty-six books during her lifetime, in addition to four posthumous collections of poems and short stories; at least 154 short stories published in theNew Yorker; her diary, published by Chatto and Windus in 1994; several volumes of correspondence; a revised and expanded edition of her poems; her translation of Marcel Proust’s critical writings inBy Way of Sainte-Beuve; and a volume of previously uncollected writings,With the Hunted, which includes many short pieces previously published in theJournal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society. The present article looks at key critical responses to Warner’s work by such writers as Jan Montefiore, Jane Marcus, Gillian Beer, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, and Mary Jacobs.

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Evans
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
The Many

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Davis’s work. Through a series of readings of Davis’s major translations and her own writing, this book investigates how Davis’s translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Davis’s work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production, questioning the received perception that translation is less creative than other forms of writing.

On the Margins of Modernism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Rosenmeier
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Extensive Study ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Chinese Writing

Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Despite being an integral part of the Chinese literary scene, their bestselling fiction has, however, been given scant attention in histories of Chinese writing. This book is the first extensive study of Xu Xu and Wumingshi in English or any other Western language and it re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s. Their romantic novels and short stories were often set abroad and featured a wide range of stereotypes, from pirates, spies and patriotic soldiers to ghosts, spirits and exotic women who confounded the mostly cosmopolitan male protagonists. Christopher Rosenmeier’s detailed analysis of these popular novels and short stories shows that such romances broke new ground by incorporating and adapting narrative techniques and themes from the Shanghai modernist writers of the 1930s, notably Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying. The study thereby contests the view that modernism had little lasting impact on Chinese fiction, and it demonstrates that the popular literature of the 1940s was more innovative than usually imagined, with authors, such as those studied here, successfully crossing the boundaries between the popular and the elite, as well as between romanticism and modernism, in their bestselling works.

Surviving The Jungle Book: Trans-temporal Ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Mendes
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Temporal Ventriloquism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Political Intervention

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’: they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.

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