A Wartime Family Romance: Narratives of Masculinity and Intimacy during World War Two

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Abrams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Emotional Openness ◽  
Romance Narratives

This chapter focuses on a neglected facet of Scottish men’s sense of self – the expression of intimacy and emotion in the context of one man’s letters home to his wife during an extended posting abroad in World War Two. Emotional openness, vulnerability, affection, devotion, romantic love and desire - these are not qualities commonly identified in the narratives of masculinity in Scotland in the twentieth century. The war provided the backdrop for a correspondence which allowed a serving soldier to explore his emotional side, and sustain his marriage, not only by consuming narratives of love but producing them too. Through a close examination of personal correspondence this chapter argues that this correspondent encapsulated a modern masculine self that Scottish men were to practice with greater confidence in the postwar decades.

‘The Lure of Pleasure’

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Sue Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Married Woman ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Good Mother

Sue Kennedy considers how Marghanita Laski’s provocative novel To Bed with Grand Music addresses the fantasy of fulfillable desires through the story of a young, married woman taking advantage of everything available in the ‘lucid abnormality’ of London during World War Two. This interfeminist counter-narrative of the protagonist’s libidinal life and her failure to perform as a good mother and faithful wife deviates from the propaganda of the People’s War rendering Laski’s undermining of this ideal at a raw moment in the nation’s psyche contentious. The essay considers the representation of the actions of a young woman and questions whether she is deserving of admiration or censure for her refusal to conform to expectations of feminine conduct. It suggests that her progress is in many ways more eighteenth than mid-twentieth century in tone presenting a woman who begins by embracing her own pleasure but later engages in ‘infamous commerce’.

Union and its Challengers in the United Kingdom

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Michael Keating
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
The State ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Parliamentary Sovereignty ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Over Time

The United Kingdom was created over time without a clear plan. Creation of the state largely coincided with the creation of the Empire so that there was not a clear distinction between the two. The union preserved many of the elements of the pre-union component parts, but was kept together by the principle of unitary parliamentary sovereignty. Within the union, the distinct nationalities developed in the modern period and produced nationalist movements. Most of these aimed at devolution within the state, but some demanded separation. Management of these demands was a key task of statecraft in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the post-World War Two era, the nationalities question appeared to have gone away but it returned in the 1970s. Devolution settlements at the end of the twentieth century represented a move to stabilize the union on new terms.

scholarly journals ‘A New Order is Being Created’: Domestic Modernism in 1930s Britain

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-428
Author(s):  
Daniel Moore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Interior Design ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
New Order ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Living Space ◽  
Standards Of Living

This article addresses the attempts in Britain in the 1930s to integrate modernist aesthetics with the home. A number of initiatives during this period were directed towards improving both standards of living and the public's taste: arising from exposure to continental modernism (Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier) and with a fervent belief in the democratisation of the living space, innovators such as Wells Coates, Jack and Molly Pritchard, and Maxwell Fry sought to re-invent the home for the twentieth century. The results were often short-lived, and in some cases, abject failures. Yet the negotiations that these designers, architects, and visionaries made between high-minded aesthetics and the practicalities of quotidian British life reveal much about standards of taste during the 1930s. This article takes two case studies in detail: The Lawn Road Flats – the Isokon Building – in Hampstead, London, and the activities of the Design and Industries Association (DIA). In doing so, I chart the ways in which interior design developed in Britain during the decade before the outbreak of World War Two, and explore how small-scale, short-lived activities in this period laid the foundations for a flowering of new modes of living post-1945.

The Adelaide Geosyncline: A Century of Controversy

1986 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reg. Sprigg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Stage ◽  
Plate Tectonics ◽  
South Australia ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
Late Precambrian ◽  
Late Cambrian ◽  
Extensive Region

Late Proterozoic (Adelaidean) to Late Cambrian sediments of the Adelaide Geosyncline form a mountainous backbone to South Australia. Geological studies of the region date back to the beginning of European exploration and colonisation, although these were limited until the 1940s due to the small, isolated nature of the geological community. No detailed understanding of this extensive region emerged until the beginning of the twentieth century when sections were measured and the significance of widespread Late Precambrian glaciation was recognised. The search for fossils has been long and often unsuccessful. Trilobites and archaeocyatha, which were later determined as Cambrian, were found as early as 1879. The internationally famous Ediacara fauna was discovered in 1946. Unusual piercement structures containing breccias were only widely mapped after World War Two with a diapiric origin being proposed in 1960. In 1952, the province was classified as basically miogeo-synclinal with a late stage eugeosyncline in the southeast. This has recently been reinterpreted in terms of plate tectonics.

Intersecting Imperialisms

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Ben Holgate
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Narrow Road ◽  
National Literatures

Abstract Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), which features the Thai-Burma “Death Railway” in World War Two, depicts a complex web of imperial regimes that converge and clash in the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist is an Australian soldier effectively fighting for his country’s former colonizer, Britain, which is losing its empire to Japan. I build on Laura Doyle’s concept of “inter-imperiality” to explore how the novel illuminates the historical process of imperial factors intersecting at multiple levels, from the geopolitical and economic to the personal and cultural. The novel demonstrates how inter-imperial identities challenge simple binary models of imperialism, and how so-called national literatures are produced in a world context. This is evident in Flanagan’s intertextual homage to classical Japanese author Matsuo Bashō. The novel also highlights how world literature discourse ought to take into account temporal and ethicopolitical factors (Pheng Cheah), suggesting an overlap with postcolonial studies.

Elizabeth Bowen and the Politics of Consent

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-39
Author(s):  
Kelly Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War

As a novelist preoccupied with the sexualized gothic conventions haunting Irish fiction since the eighteenth century, Bowen persistently turns to the fraught concept of British and Irish women's consent during periods of twentieth-century political violence. This article considers Bowen's use of gothic tropes of consent in The Last September (1929) as well as a more sustained engagement with the Irish gothic, citizen-subjecthood, and the political valence of consent in her WWII thriller, The Heat of the Day (1948). It argues that in formulating consent in relation to knowledge, and in articulating the necessarily contractual nature of consent, Bowen seeks to define the ethics of individual rights and responsibility during and after World War Two.

Forgetting Lutheranism: Historians and the Early Reformation in Poland (1517–1548)

2012 ◽  
Vol 92 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Minority Politics ◽  
State Sponsorship ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Significant Locus ◽  
The 1960S

This article reconstructs and explores the problematic historiography of the early Reformation in the lands of the Polish Crown, a significant locus of Lutheranism in the reign of King Zygmunt I Jagiellon (1506–1548). The eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-to mid twentieth centuries produced a sizeable literature on early Lutheranism in Poland, fuelled by Polish-German conflict, minority politics, and Stalinist state sponsorship. Since the 1960s, however, scholarship in Polish and German has had very little to say about Lutheranism in the lands of the Polish Crown before 1548. It is argued that the discrediting of Ostforschung after World War Two, coupled with the rise of a new Polish nationalist reading of the Reformation from the 1960s (which rejected Lutheranism as German, and un-Polish), have led to a deliberate twentieth-century “forgetting” of the Polish kingdom’s Lutheran past, which impoverishes our understandings of the European Reformations.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

The Formation of a Budding Man Alone: The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
World War ◽  
Value System ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Family

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

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