4 The Short Story of the First World War

2021 ◽  
pp. 103-116
Author(s):  
Ann-Marie Einhaus
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 796
Author(s):  
Yufeng Wang

“Big Two-Hearted River” is one of the Nick Adams Stories from Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection In Our Time. The story is told in a detailed description of Nick’s “trivial” experience in his Michigan resort after the veteran was back from the First World War. Up to now, the Nick Adams stories together with Hemingway’s other works have been interpreted by literary critics from different perspectives, among which the code hero image, death consciousness, nihilism, alienation and the artistic features are usually focused upon. This article intends to investigate “Big Two-Hearted River” from an eco-critical point of view. The study points out that Hemingway expressed his ecological consciousness in this short story about the harmonious relationship between man and nature; through the detailed narration of Nick’s simple experience of camping and fishing, “Big Two-Hearted River” vividly exposes the theme of returning to nature. The study actually reflects Hemingway’s ecological consciousness based on his yearning towards the beauty of nature.


Author(s):  
Rachael Stanley

This chapter discusses Mansfield’s depiction in her diary and in the short story, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, of her visit to the French town of Gray during the First World War to meet her newly taken lover, Francis Carco. Mansfield’s description of this event involves a slippage between English and French, revealing a degree of instability in her writing that deliberately undermines her omnipotence as narrator. By carefully locating those moments in her retelling of this journey where we find translation being silently undertaken, where phrases are rendered in ungrammatical or non-idiomatic English, we can open up where the fictional account of this event diverges from the ‘real’ event that took place on 19th February 1915. The French language is revealed to be a marker of Mansfield’s attempt to repress and make unreal the more troubling and upsetting realities not only of war, but of a doomed love affair.


Author(s):  
Rudyard Kipling

‘Hear and attend and listen...’ Rudyard Kipling is a supreme master of the short story in English and a poet of brilliant gifts. His energy and inventiveness poured themselves into every kind of tale, from the bleakest of fables to the richest of comedies, and he illuminated every aspect of human behaviour, of which he was a fascinated (and sometimes appalled) observer. This generous selection of stories and poems, first published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series, covers the full range of Kipling’s career from the youthful volumes that brought him fame as the chronicler of British India, to the bittersweet fruits of age and bereavement in the aftermath of the First World War. It includes stories such as ‘The Man who would be King’, ‘Mrs Bathurst’, and ‘Mary Postgate’, and poems from Barrack-Room Ballads and other collections. In his introduction and notes Daniel Karlin addresses the controversial political engagement of Kipling’s art, and the sources of its imaginative power.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-200
Author(s):  
Minna Vuohelainen

Between 1884 and 1936, Rudyard Kipling wrote over 300 short stories, most of which were first published in colonial and cosmopolitan periodicals before being reissued in short-story collections. This corpus contains a number of critically neglected Gothic stories that fall into four groups: stories that belong to the ghost-story tradition; stories that represent the colonial encounter through gothic tropes of horror and the uncanny but do not necessarily include any supernatural elements; stories that develop an elegiac and elliptical Gothic Modernism; and stories that make use of the First World War and its aftermath as a gothic environment. This essay evaluates Kipling's contribution to the critically neglected genre of the Gothic short story, with a focus on the stories' persistent preoccupation with spatial tropes of travel, disorientation and displacement.


2010 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janka Kaščáková

Detachment from meaningful movement in time; the gradual development of history disrupted by absurdity and the cruelty of the First World War; the wasteland of European civilization and the reduction of individuals into ghastly numbers; human existence no longer firmly attached with regard to meaning: all this, in Modernist texts, translates into both scattered bits and conflicted yet meaningful juxtapositions. To use T.S. Eliot’s famous line, literature becomes a “heap of broken images” and all authors wish to express this disruption and deal with it in their own particular way. One of the direct representations of the inability of writers to cope with contemporary reality is the fragmentation of the text, often accompanied by the frequent use of ellipses. This is especially noticeable in the works of the New Zealand Modernist Katherine Mansfield; her short stories build on what is said as much as on what is left unsaid; they make use of empty spaces bearing meaning, speaking silence- all this requires an active reader, drawn into the creation of the story. This paper discusses Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” with an emphasis on the unexpressed, or implied, the use of ellipses and omissions; it analyzes their interactions with the content of the story; and concludes that what has been omitted is as important as what has been included.


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