scholarly journals The Ideologies of War and Social Class in Atonement: A Critical Stylistic Analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-184
Author(s):  
Doha Mahmoud Abdel-Moety
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
British Society ◽  
Stylistic Analysis ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

Abstract The present study is concerned with the representation of ideologies in fiction. It attempts an analysis of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement and aims at revealing the ideologies of war and social class by analysing textual conceptual functions. It applies a critical stylistic analysis based on Jeffries’s (2010) framework. The study addresses the following questions: How are the concepts of war and social class presented in the novel? Which categories are used to introduce war and social class in the novel? What is the linguistic realization of the categories selected? What does Atonement reveal about British society and the period during which the events took place? To what extent are McEwan’s ideologies reflected in the novel? The results of the study show that war and social class constitute an important part in the novel. There are references to them from the very beginning of the novel. They are presented ideologically through the categories of naming and describing, negating, representing actions/events/states, prioritizing, hypothesizing, implying and assuming, presenting others’ speech and thoughts, and representing time, space and society. These categories employed specific linguistic realizations that helped the author achieve his purpose and influence readers. The results also reveal the way Atonement portrays the circumstances of British society before, during, and after the Second World War. Moreover, they indicate the existence of historically accurate information related to war. Finally, the results demonstrate that the representations of war and social class in Atonement are ideologically loaded. These representations reflect McEwan’s own attitude toward history, war, and social class.

scholarly journals Dokia Humenna’s Depiction of the Second World War and the OUN in Khreshchatyi iar: How Readers Responded

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Myroslav Shkandrij
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Ukrainian Academy ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Emigre Literature ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

<p class="EW-abstract"><strong>Abstract:</strong> When Dokia Humenna’s novel depicting the Second World War, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em> (Khreshchatyk Ravine), was published in New York in 1956, it created a controversy. Readers were particularly interested in the way activists of the OUN were portrayed. This article analyzes readers’ comments and Humenna’s responses, which are today stored in the archives of the Ukrainian Academy of Science in New York. The novel is based on a diary Humenna kept during the German occupation of Kyiv in the years 1941-1943.</p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Dokia Humenna, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em>, Second World War, OUN, Émigré Literature, Reader Response

Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty: Selected Correspondence

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Eudora Welty ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Second World

Over her career, Elizabeth Bowen published ten novels, yet she left no comprehensive theory of the novel. This essay draws especially upon ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (1945), ‘The Technique of the Novel’ (1953), and ‘Truth and Fiction’ (1956), as well as opinions that Bowen expressed in her weekly book columns for The Tatler, to formulate her key perceptions of, and rules for, writing a novel. Bowen defined her ideas by drawing upon the empirical evidence of novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Manning, H.E. Bates, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and numerous others. She gave particular thought to ‘situation’, by which she means the central problematic or the crux of the story. The situation precedes and fuels plot. The Second World War, Bowen claimed in her essays and reviews, had a decisive influence on heroism and contemporary fiction by heightening its scale and its repertory of situations.

Life stories: biography and creativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-44
Author(s):  
Paul Thompson ◽  
Ken Plummer ◽  
Neli Demireva
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
World War ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
And Gender ◽  
University Expansion ◽  
Second World

This chapter traces the engine of the pioneers' success and discusses their earlier lives, hinting or reflecting on how these experiences may have shaped their research. It begins by analyzing how the pioneers' were influenced by the communities where they grew up. Looking at the pioneers' families as a whole, even though this generation for which unprecedented university expansion brought rare opportunities for upward mobility, the chapter examines the pioneers' working-class families and old Oxbridge intellectual aristocracy. It notes that some of the key factors which brought them opportunities were due to national social changes and international events. The chapter also looks at how the older generation generally benefitted from Second World War experiences that took them out of their social-class cocoon. The chapter then discusses the pioneers who chose to explore other cultures rather than to research their own communities. It emphasizes social class injustice, racism, and gender injustice.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Cairns Craig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
World War ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Second World

Muriel Spark has regularly been described as a Catholic novelist, given that her conversion to Catholicism was followed closely by the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, about the struggles of a Catholic convert. However, the intellectual context in which she came to maturity in the years after the Second World War was pervaded by the issues raised by existentialism, issues which surface directly in her novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Existentialism is now associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an atheistic philosophy, but it began as a Christian philosophy inspired by nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism which shaped Spark’s own ‘leap to faith’ and his ironic style which shaped her own approach to the novel form.

Living Democracy

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-254
Author(s):  
Martin Conway
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Rapid Economic Growth ◽  
Post War ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
Second World

This chapter focuses on the consumption of democracy. What happened in the roughly twenty-five-year period from the end of the Second World War to the late 1960s is perhaps best regarded as a process of gradual acculturation. At different speeds and by different paths, a large majority of Western Europeans came to feel at home in democracy, and began to practise democracy for themselves. However, the new democracies were more equal in their formal structures than in their social reality. The reassertion of boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and age, after the more fluid and often chaotic experiences of the war years, was reinforced by the evolving but persistent inequalities of social class. Western Europe emphatically remained a class society after 1945. The rapid economic growth that occurred during the post-war years generated new forms of affluence, but these were distributed in ways that reinforced pre-existing class divisions. In particular, the post-war years witnessed a resurgence in the fortunes of the middle class. Whether assessed in terms of its material prosperity, its influence within and over government, or its wider social and cultural ascendancy, the middle class was the dominant social class of the post-war era.

Austin, John Langshaw (1911–60)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.O. Urmson
Keyword(s):  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
World War ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

J.L. Austin was a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the fifteen years following the Second World War. He developed a method of close examination of nonphilosophical language designed to illuminate the distinctions we make in ordinary life. Professional philosophers tended to obscure these important and subtle distinctions with undesirable jargon which was too far removed from everyday usage. Austin thought that a problem should therefore be tackled by an examination of the way in which its vocabulary is used in ordinary situations. Such an approach would then expose the misuses of language on which many philosophical claims were based. In ‘Other Minds’ ([1946] 1961), Austin attacked the simplistic division of utterances into the ‘descriptive’ and ‘evaluative’ using his notion of a performatory, or performative utterances. His notion was that certain utterances, in the appropriate circumstances, are neither descriptive nor evaluative, but count as actions. Thus to say ‘I promise’ is to make a promise, not to talk about one. Later, he was to develop the concepts of locutionary force (what an utterance says or refers to), illocutionary force (what is intended by saying it) and perlocutionary force (what effects it has on others).

Modern Idiom in an Ancient Context

1962 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-141
Author(s):  
G. H. Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Article ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Simple Situation ◽  
Second Punic War ◽  
Direct Results ◽  
Second World ◽  
Proper Context ◽  
The Way

Since the Second World War we have been subjected to a flood of memoirs and counter-memoirs by generals, admirals, air marshals, and politicians. One of the direct results of this is that our vocabulary has been increased—if not enriched—by a military jargon. Most of the latter's terms have in fact very specialized meanings, and if they are used out of their proper context they can present a highly coloured view of a rather simple situation. Can these terms be applied with validity to historical situations of antiquity ? At first sight there is an attraction in theirvery modernity, for they seem to give a freshness of approach; but Professor Salmon's use of them in his recent article, ‘The Strategy of the Second Punic War’, has made the dangers of their use manifestly clear. By his use of these anachronisms—for that is surely what they are—Professor Salmon has given nothing new in the way of interpretation, but merely provided confirmation of Oman's dictum ‘Historians may have the most divergent views according to their predispositions’, and has exaggerated the capabilities of both sides beyond belief.

scholarly journals Friends in war: Sweden between solidarity and self-help, 1939–1945

2020 ◽  
pp. 001083672090438
Author(s):  
Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou ◽  
Felix Berenskötter
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Winter War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

This article scrutinizes the assumption that friends support each other in times of war. Picking up the notion that solidarity, or ‘other-help’, is a key feature of friendship between states, the article explores how states behave when a friend is attacked by an overwhelming enemy. It directs attention to the trade-off between solidarity and self-help that governments face in such a situation and makes the novel argument that the decision about whether and how to support the friend is significantly influenced by assessments of the distribution of material capabilities and the relationship the state has with the aggressor. This proposition is supported empirically in an examination of Sweden’s response to its Nordic friends’ need for help during the Second World War – to Finland during the 1939–1940 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union, and to Norway following the invasion of Germany from 1940 to 1945.

scholarly journals Introduction: European Integration across the Twentieth Century

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-207
Author(s):  
STEPHEN G. GROSS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Order ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Regional Order ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

This forum explores continuities and transformations in the way Europeans thought about integrating their continent politically, economically and ideologically across the twentieth century. It questions the idea of aStunde Null, which sees European integration primarily as a response to the destruction of the Second World War. Instead, the forum shows how mentalities, ideologies, challenges and constraints that arose before 1945 shaped the way European elites conceptualised and pursued unification in the post-war decades. The European leaders who orchestrated integration after 1945 were looking both backward and forward, trying to revive older visions for a unified continent and overcome long-standing problems while simultaneously aspiring to a new, supranational regional order that would preserve Europe's position as a global power. In exploring such continuities, this forum adds a regionalist dimension to the burgeoning literature – by Patricia Clavin, Daniel Gorman, Mark Mazower and others – on the connections between interwar internationalism and the post-1945 global order, and on the continuity of intellectuals, experts and politicians through the middle half of the twentieth century.

War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War.

1987 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 660
Author(s):  
Sean Glynn ◽  
Harold L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Second World War ◽  
British Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World
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