scholarly journals ‘A Construction in the Void’, Formal Architecture in the Novels of Edith Wharton

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Isabel Parker
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Great War ◽  
Interior Architecture ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The House Of Mirth ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

<p>Edith Wharton has been persistently framed as an author detached from the ‘modern’ twentieth century literary world she inhabited. Intellectually compromised by critical conceptions of her as the “last Victorian”, and Henry James’s “heiress”, Wharton’s attentiveness to modernism’s fractured worldview and her original employment of literary form to redress this perspective have been largely overlooked. This thesis seeks to re-evaluate Wharton’s ‘old-fashioned’ authorial persona. Instead of reading her commitment to a past perspective as evidence of her literary obsolescence, this thesis argues that her adherence to a bygone worldview serves as a means of managing the disorientation and disorder of the modern, incomprehensible present. Following Wharton’s evolving conception of stylised aesthetic form across pre-war and post-war worlds, I suggest that Wharton’s literature evidences a tension between two opposing literary aspirations. On the one hand, her texts reveal a desire to abandon aesthetic enclosures and realise an unbounded, authentic interior reality. Yet on the other hand, Wharton’s works underscore the poignant sense of fulfillment acquired within a life bound by such aesthetic architecture. Chapter One outlines Wharton’s critical stance in relation to both realism and modernism. It discusses the way in which the outbreak of the Great War motivated Wharton’s implementation of a critical ‘interior architecture’, in which a modernist interiority is held in play alongside an encompassing realist reality. Chapter Two assesses the stunted nature of stylised aesthetic forms in the pre-war world as evinced in The House of Mirth (1905). There, Wharton demonstrates how a lack of grounding in reality renders such aesthetics devoid of an internal anchorage that clarifies their purposeful relation to the world around them. Vacant of real-world relation, such forms abstract, disintegrating into formlessness. In Chapter Three, I reveal how Wharton moves from scorning to celebrating the artificial nature of aesthetic form in the wake of the Great War. In The Age of Innocence (1920), aesthetic forms deemed arbitrary and artificial in The House of Mirth are reevaluated and revealed as possessing an invisible, intrinsic real-world purpose. From denying realism, stylised aesthetics are redeemed in their attempt to frame individuals in relation to a formless world. Though such forms are inherently fictitious, Wharton asserts that their provision of an illusion of structure aids in the preservation of interpersonal and intergenerational connection. These forms thus cultivate an interior architecture within which society can shelter against an intrinsically unstable reality.</p>

scholarly journals ‘A Construction in the Void’, Formal Architecture in the Novels of Edith Wharton

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Isabel Parker
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Great War ◽  
Interior Architecture ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The House Of Mirth ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

<p>Edith Wharton has been persistently framed as an author detached from the ‘modern’ twentieth century literary world she inhabited. Intellectually compromised by critical conceptions of her as the “last Victorian”, and Henry James’s “heiress”, Wharton’s attentiveness to modernism’s fractured worldview and her original employment of literary form to redress this perspective have been largely overlooked. This thesis seeks to re-evaluate Wharton’s ‘old-fashioned’ authorial persona. Instead of reading her commitment to a past perspective as evidence of her literary obsolescence, this thesis argues that her adherence to a bygone worldview serves as a means of managing the disorientation and disorder of the modern, incomprehensible present. Following Wharton’s evolving conception of stylised aesthetic form across pre-war and post-war worlds, I suggest that Wharton’s literature evidences a tension between two opposing literary aspirations. On the one hand, her texts reveal a desire to abandon aesthetic enclosures and realise an unbounded, authentic interior reality. Yet on the other hand, Wharton’s works underscore the poignant sense of fulfillment acquired within a life bound by such aesthetic architecture. Chapter One outlines Wharton’s critical stance in relation to both realism and modernism. It discusses the way in which the outbreak of the Great War motivated Wharton’s implementation of a critical ‘interior architecture’, in which a modernist interiority is held in play alongside an encompassing realist reality. Chapter Two assesses the stunted nature of stylised aesthetic forms in the pre-war world as evinced in The House of Mirth (1905). There, Wharton demonstrates how a lack of grounding in reality renders such aesthetics devoid of an internal anchorage that clarifies their purposeful relation to the world around them. Vacant of real-world relation, such forms abstract, disintegrating into formlessness. In Chapter Three, I reveal how Wharton moves from scorning to celebrating the artificial nature of aesthetic form in the wake of the Great War. In The Age of Innocence (1920), aesthetic forms deemed arbitrary and artificial in The House of Mirth are reevaluated and revealed as possessing an invisible, intrinsic real-world purpose. From denying realism, stylised aesthetics are redeemed in their attempt to frame individuals in relation to a formless world. Though such forms are inherently fictitious, Wharton asserts that their provision of an illusion of structure aids in the preservation of interpersonal and intergenerational connection. These forms thus cultivate an interior architecture within which society can shelter against an intrinsically unstable reality.</p>

Reconstituting the International, 1918–1923

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay
Keyword(s):  
Seismic Events ◽  
Great War ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Meaning And Purpose ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Do So ◽  
Lengthy Process

This chapter examines the post-war efforts of European socialists to reconstitute the Socialist International. Initial efforts to cooperate culminated in an international socialist conference in Berne in February 1919 at which socialists from the two wartime camps met for the first time. In the end, however, it would take four years to reconstitute the International with the creation of the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) in 1923. That it took so long to do so is a testimony to the impact of the Great War and to the Bolshevik revolution. Together, these two seismic events compelled socialists to reconsider the meaning and purpose of socialism. The search for answers sparked prolonged debates between and within the major parties, profoundly reconfiguring the pre-war world of European socialism. One prominent stake in this lengthy process, moreover, was the nature of socialist internationalism—both its content and its functioning.

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.

Fighting for the Empire

2019 ◽  
pp. 16-42
Author(s):  
Dónal Hassett
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
The Political ◽  
Great War ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

This chapter explores the history of military service in Algeria and across the colonial world before and during the Great War. It introduces the reader to key concepts from the fields of colonial history and First World War studies that are crucial to understanding the political legacies of the entanglement of the colonies and, especially, Algeria with the Great War. Taking a comparative approach, it explains the range of legal categories that underpinned colonial rule within the different empires and considers how the rights and responsibilities they implied were connected to and altered by military service. The chapter also examines the variety of attitudes toward the use of colonial soldiers in the different imperial polities and asks how these influenced the expectations of post-war reform in the colonies.

The Great War and Paramilitarism in Europe, 1917–23

2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT GERWARTH ◽  
JOHN HORNE
Keyword(s):  
Global Perspective ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Great War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this comparative conclusion, the authors consider some of the most influential trends in the historiography of political and paramilitary violence, with particular reference to the relationship between wartime and post-war violence. The heuristic value of the ‘aftershocks’ metaphor is considered, as are the advantages (and potential pitfalls) of the contributors’ transnational approach. Finally, the authors suggest an agenda for future research on paramilitary violence, which looks at the phenomenon in a global perspective.

scholarly journals CULTURE VS.KULTUR, OR A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE GREAT WAR, 1917–1918

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-182
Author(s):  
MOSHIK TEMKIN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great War ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article analyses the historical conditions for, and implications of, the attitudes and conduct of a number of prominent or influential public intellectuals in the United States during the Great War. It argues that many intellectuals, particularly those who supported American entry to the war, shared a general lack of concern with the realities of full-scale warfare. Their response to the war had little to do with the war itself – its political and economic causes, brutal and industrial character, and human and material costs. Rather, their positions were often based on their views of culture and philosophy, or on their visions of the post-war world. As a result, relatively few of these intellectuals fully considered the political, social, and economic context in which the catastrophe occurred. The war, to many of them, was primarily a clash of civilizations, a battle of good versus evil, civilized democracy versus barbaric savagery, progress versus backwardness, culture versus kultur. The article describes several manifestations of American intellectual approaches to the war, discusses the correlation between intellectual and general public attitudes, and concludes with some implications for thinking about the relationship between intellectuals and war in more recent American history.

scholarly journals The Reality of Return: Exploring the Experiences of World War One Soldiers after Their Return to New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Coralie Clarkson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Idealistic View

<p>The focus of this thesis is the lives of New Zealand's returned Great War soldiers. This thesis explores the experiences of men who did not successfully repatriate as a counterpoint to the experiences of those who did, and argues that men's return to New Zealand and their post war lives were shaped by many factors including access to employment and good health. Many returned soldiers were able to resume their lives on return and led relatively happy and successful lives. For these men, their success seems to have come from the ability to find or resume employment, good health, family support, and financial support. For those who did not, one or more of these factors was often missing, and this could lead to short or long term struggle. The 1920s form the backdrop of this thesis, and were a time of uncertainty and anxiety for returned men and their families. The disillusionment of the 1920s was exacerbated by men's nostalgia for New Zealand which they built up during the war. Tens of thousands of men returned to New Zealand from war with dreams and hopes for the future. The horrors of war had given men an idealistic view of peaceful New Zealand, and dreams of home comforts and loved ones had sustained these men through their long absence. For those who returned to find life difficult, the idealistic view of New Zealand as a land of simplicity and happiness would have been hard to maintain. Chapter 1 demonstrates the idealisation of New Zealand and 'home' built up by soldiers and their families during the war. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 use the lenses of employment, illness – specifically tuberculosis – and alcoholism to argue that for many men and their families, the 1920s were an extension of the anxieties and separation of the Great War years. Sadly, for some, their lives were forever marred by the spectre of war and what their absence from home cost them.</p>

scholarly journals Forêt de Guerre: Natural remembrances of the Great War

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-34
Author(s):  
Orlando Prestidge ◽  
Orlando Prestidge
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Historic Sites ◽  
Region I ◽  
French Culture ◽  
Physical Effects ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Landscape Trees

I will discuss the effect that the Great War had on the medieval woodland landscape of France, and how the cataclysmic destruction of the conflict is now represented, remembered and sometimes even preserved by the presence of post-war woodland. The unparalleled quantities of munitions that tore apart the landscape from 1914-1918 had both physical effects at the time, as well as longer-lasting manifestations that we see today. The first use of chemical weapons, along with the problems posed by their disbursement and disposal, also still affect the soil of the Western Front, as well as the trees and plants that traditionally grew in the region. I will also analyse the deeper and far more ancient significance of forests and trees within French culture, and how this has affected the way that people have interacted with the ‘Forêt de guerre’ landscape that grew up to replace that lost during the hostilities.  World War I; 1914-18; Archaeology; Anthropology; Folklore; Landscape; Trees; Forests; Zone Rouge; Historic Sites - France

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