Scottish Literature and World War I

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
War Literature ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Charles Murray ◽  
Lewis Grassic Gibbon

This work is the first book-length study of Scottish Great War literature. Rather than arguing the war exerted a singular influence on the country’s writing, the collection highlights the variety of literary, social, political, and philosophical reverberations of the war in Scotland literature. Part one of the collection presents multi-text case studies of nationalism, pastoralism, Scottish Great War prose, popular literature, women’s, letters to the editor, Gaelic writing, and philosophy. Part two contains essays devoted to individual authors, including canonical figures such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Nan Shepherd, Neil Gunn and John Buchan, as well as peripheral authors such as George A. C. Mackinlay, Charles Murray and Ewart Alan Mackintosh.

‘A reflection of the contrasts’: Scottish Literature and World War I

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
David A. Rennie
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
War Literature ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Historical Role

Surveys the varying interpretations of Scottish Great War Literature put forward by scholars and suggests the critical reception of Scottish World War I literature has, at times, been too focused on generalisations of the effects of World War I on Scottish writing. The Introduction situates the collection within wider trends in World War I literary scholarship and provides a summary of Scotland’s historical role in the war – on the home and military fronts.

A Challenge to Global Literary History: The Case of World War I

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-238
Author(s):  
Margaret R. Higonnet
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Literary History ◽  
War Literature ◽  
Critical Values ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War

Abstract This essay begins by investigating the possibility of a global literary history through the lens of periodization and its challenges for comparatists, starting from World War I. Second, by examining neglected texts from the periphery, it seeks to ‘provincialize’ the Eurocentric focus of our histories of war literature. To address the complex temporality of this epoch, we must accommodate the multicultural contexts from which these works emerge, as well as the long-term recovery of texts. Belatedness reflects the reemergence of memories from trauma, the discovery of manuscripts, the paucity of translations, and the long silencing of marginalized voices from the periphery. In turn, shifts in critical values and the translation of materials permit us to enlarge and reconstitute a globalized archive, as a few examples demonstrate. Great War texts by Huidobro, Svarnakumari, and Diallo as well as oral laments offer fruitful perspectives from the periphery on that epochal experience.

The Expatriate Idyll

2018 ◽  
pp. 98-125
Author(s):  
William Cloonan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
War Literature ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
American Expatriates ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War

A critique of American expatriates, mostly veterans of World War I, who turn Europe into a vast American playground. The alleged justification of their behaviour is their traumatic experiences of the Great War which has been over for ten years at the start of the novel. Robert Cohn’s character contrasts with that of his fellow expatriates and sheds light on their affections and sterility. He also represents the condition of post-war literature, severely tried by the realities of the war, but slowly re-establishing its strength and ability to comment meaningfully on the contemporary world.

Commemorating World War I Soldiers as Martyrs

Martyrdom ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Willem van Henten
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Great War ◽  
Stained Glass ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Church

Jan Willem van Henten takes a speech by the English Bishop Arthur Winnington Ingram from 1914 for the bereaved families of fallen soldiers as point of departure for a survey of the commemoration of soldiers who died in World War 1 as martyrs. Winnington Ingram characterises the soldiers whom he commemorates as martyrs and links them to Stephen, the proto-martyr of the Church (Acts 7). Van Henten explores whether Winnington Ingram’s speech is an isolated case or if others also commemorated soldiers who were killed during the Great War as martyrs, indirectly or explicitly. Van Henten concentrates on several case studies about German and British soldiers: a mosaic referring to the soldiers, a chapel at two German military cemeteries in Belgium (Hooglede and Menen), and a stained glass window and a table with names of the fallen at the All Saints Church at Huntingdon (Cambridgeshire). This chapter discusses the particularities of these commemorations as well as how the soldiers are associated with martyrdom and the reward of martyrs with the help of Christian pictorial traditions and specific biblical passages.

The Great War of the Postcards

2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-568
Author(s):  
Johann Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Book Illustrations ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War

This article examines the functions and the significance of picture postcards during World War I, with particular reference to the war in the Ottoman Lands and the Balkans, or involving the Turkish Army in Galicia. After the principal types of Kriegspostkarten – sentimental, humorous, propaganda, and artistic postcards (Künstlerpostkarten) – have been presented, the different theatres of war (Balkans, Galicia, Middle East) and their characteristic features as they are reflected on postcards are dealt with. The piece also includes aspects such as the influence of Orientalism, the problem of fake views, and the significance and the impact of photographic postcards, portraits, and photo cards. The role of postcards in book illustrations is demonstrated using a typical example (F. C. Endres, Die Türkei (1916)). The specific features of a collection of postcards left by a German soldier who served in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq during World War I will be presented at the end of this article.

scholarly journals The Politics of Russian Memory: The Great War in the European Context

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-235
Author(s):  
Olga S. Porshneva
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Great War

This article examines how the historical memory of World War I emerged and developed in Russia, and also compares it to how Europeans have thought about the conflict. The author argues that the politics of memory differed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Bolshevik efforts to re-format the memory of the Great War were part of its attempt to create a new society and new man. At the same time, the regime used it to mobilize society for the impending conflict with the 'imperialist' powers. The key actors that sought to inculcate the notion of the war with imperialism into Soviet mass consciousness were the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, and, in particular, the Red Army and Comintern. The latter two worked together to organize the major campaigns dedicated to war anniversaries, which were important both to reinforce the concept of imperialist war as well as to involve the masses in public commemorations, rituals and practices. The Soviet state also relied on organizations of war veterans to promote such commemorative practices while suppressing any alternative narratives. The article goes on to explain how, under Stalin, the government began to change the way it portrayed the Great War in the mid-1930s. And after the Second World War, Soviet politics of memory differed greatly from those in the West. In the USSR the Great Patriotic War was sacralized, while the earlier conflict remained a symbol of unjust imperialist wars.

From the Great War to White Christmas

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-114
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Magee
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Great War

Irving Berlin’s all-soldier World War I revue, Yip Yip Yaphank, made a unique impact on Broadway in 1918 and in Berlin’s work for decades to come. The show forged a compelling and comic connection between theatrical conventions and military protocols, using elements from minstrelsy, the Ziegfeld Follies, and Berlin’s distinctive songs. Featuring such Berlin standards as “Sterling Silver Moon” (later revised as “Mandy”) and “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” it was revised for World War II as This Is the Army, and scenes from it reappear, transformed, in Berlin’s films Alexander’s Ragtime Band and White Christmas.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Identity ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.

Remarque, Erich Maria (1898–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Gammel
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Wide Readership ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Quiet Day

Born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabrück, Germany, Erich Maria Remarque is best known for his influential anti-war novel Im Westen nichts Neues (1929, All Quiet on the Western Front). First serialized in the Vossische Zeitung in 1928, All Quiet was launched with an unprecedented advertising campaign. Hailed as ‘the great war novel’, the book spawned a world-wide readership with translations into over twenty-five languages, and a film (directed by Lewis Milestone) in 1930. Written within just a few months in 1927, All Quiet on the Western Front toys with autobiographical references. The protagonist Paul Bäumer is a nineteen-year old war veteran whose seemingly non-consequential death in October 1918, on a ‘quiet’ day on the Western front, stands for the shared fate of millions of soldiers obscured by the unprecedented violence and horror of World War I. Remarque changed his name after the war, dropping his middle name Paul, and adopting his mother’s name, Maria, while also Gallicizing the spelling of his last name, thereby blurring national boundaries.

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