After Life – Expressions of Mourning in Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-26
Author(s):  
Juliane Römhild
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Great War ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War

Like many women, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim lost members of their immediate family in the Great War, and both writers worked through their loss in writing. Although their work is stylistically and thematically different, the expressions of grief in their work shares certain characteristics with other (post-)war writing. This article examines the literary responses to personal to loss in von Arnim’s novels Christine and In the Mountains, as well as Mansfield’s New Zealand stories and “The Fly” with the help of their private diaries and letters.

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 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>

Reports of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911–14, and of the British-Australian-New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition, 1929–31

Polar Record ◽  
1938 ◽  
Vol 2 (15) ◽  
pp. 60-61
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Government Printing ◽  
Great War ◽  
Antarctic Expedition ◽  
Commonwealth Government ◽  
Antarctic Research ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War

It is pleasant to be able to record that the printing of the results of the Australasian Antarctic expedition of 1911–14 has been resumed. It will be remembered that the publication of these reports was greatly interfered with by the Great War. During the post-war years the reports were slowly issued from the Government Printing Office, Sydney; but, in 1930, in the absence of financial provision for continuing the work, the printing of the manuscripts was suspended. A resumption of the printing of these reports has now become possible through the good offices of the Minister of Education, Mr D. H. Drumond, largely owing to generous assistance from the Commonwealth Government.

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 ‘The Menace of Effeminacy’: Medical and Popular Discussions of Masculinity in Interwar New Zealand, c.1918-1939

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ailish Wallace-Buckland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Sexual Offenders ◽  
The State ◽  
Male Sexuality ◽  
Great War ◽  
Male Body ◽  
World War One ◽  
Mental Defectives ◽  
The Great War

<p>In January 1932, the Sydney-based lifestyle magazine Health and Physical Culture published an article titled ‘The Menace of Effeminacy’. This article, written by Carl Hertzig, and read by magazine-subscribers across the Tasman, documented anxieties around the state of men and masculinity following the upheaval of the Great War. Touching on topics such as gender, psychology, eugenics, and sexuality this article and its concerns represent those that this thesis explores in order to understand what the ‘fear of effeminacy’ actually meant for New Zealanders during the interwar years (c.1918-1939). This thesis documents and analyses contemporary discussions of male sexuality and masculinity through a series of sources in order to establish the ways in which these concepts were understood in interwar New Zealand. Firstly, it examines some of the key pieces of legislation and reports that demonstrated official approaches, and ways of thinking, towards mental defectives, sexual offenders, and those with war neuroses. It then explores medical journals, and the dissertations of medical students; and finally, it analyses parts of popular print culture in Aotearoa/New Zealand, such as magazines and newspapers, in order to investigate and piece together the landscape in which said anxieties around effeminacy, masculinity, mental stability, and other deviations from the societally prescribed norm met. This thesis approaches these primary sources in such a way that acknowledges the evolutionary framework of understanding that was pervasive in medical circles during this era.  By thus examining the connections between constructions of the male body, homosexuality and effeminacy, late nineteenth to early twentieth century ideas around eugenics, and psychology and psychiatry, this work further uncovers the state of masculinity and male sexuality in New Zealand during the interwar period. This thesis argues that the ‘threat’ to masculinity perceived in a variety of venues was a mixture of anxieties around physical and mental wounds inflicted by the Great War; population concerns exacerbated by the exposure of the health-standards of troops, and worries of how to recover and reconstruct a virile society following four years of strife; concerns at the apparent loosening of sexual mores, and the changing manifestations of both masculinity and femininity; and ever increasing interest in the psychology of self, sexuality, and society. It adds to existing work on post-World War One masculinity by centring New Zealand discussions and understandings in a way that contributes to the broader literature on New Zealand twentieth-century masculinity, psychology and psychiatry, eugenics, and male sexuality.</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>

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.

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