Unquiet on the Home Front: Scottish Popular Fiction and the Truth of War

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454599.003.0003 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 62-80

Author(s):

David Goldie

Keyword(s):

Popular Fiction ◽

Home Front ◽

Non Fiction ◽

Popular Writing ◽

Serial Fiction

This chapter focuses on the popular writing of the war, from the serial fiction of popular newspapers to the volumes of wartime non-fiction and fiction of Scottish writers such as Patrick MacGill, Ian Hay, Boyd Cable, and R. W. Campbell. The chapter will attempt to qualify the notion that popular war writing helped effect a separation between soldiers and civilians through its tendency to glamourise and sanitise war scenes and describe them in euphemistic terms. This chapter will argue there was, in fact, a considerable amount of realism and violence in popular war writing.

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‘Weird and fantastic realism’: Science and Stories in the Work of Grant Allen

Victorian Popular Fictions Journal ◽

10.46911/dtmm2898 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 140-154

Author(s):

Beth Mills

Keyword(s):

Short Story ◽

Popular Fiction ◽

Popular Literature ◽

Formal Training ◽

Fiction Writing ◽

Non Fiction ◽

Professional Science ◽

Economic Necessity ◽

Fantastic Realism ◽

Grant Allen

Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a well-known populariser of natural history who was widely recognised for his extensive knowledge of science and his ability to refashion complex ideas for general audiences. But his status as a popular writer, coupled with a lack of formal training, placed him at the margins of professional science and impeded his serious scientific ambitions. Although Allen tended to portray fiction-writing as an economic necessity, both contemporary and recent critics have noted stylistic innovations that place him within germinal popular genres of the fin de siècle. This paper aims to show that Allen’s contributions to late-Victorian popular literature derive in part from his negotiation of fiction and non-fiction genres. Focusing particularly on his experiments with the short story, it considers how and to what extent he distinguished scientific from literary writing, while revealing his views on plausibility in fiction to be more complex than is typically recognised. Little-studied reviews of Allen’s popular fiction suggest the wider contemporary impact of his experimentations. That critics recognised his style as unconventional endorses a reappraisal of his place within developments in late-Victorian popular literature.

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WAR-INFLUENCED BIOGRAPHY OF TYUMEN MEN OF LETTERS, THE ALUMNI AND FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TYUMEN

Tyumen State University Herald Humanities Research Humanitates ◽

10.21684/2411-197x-2020-6-4-165-180 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (4) ◽

pp. 165-180

Author(s):

Vera P. Litovchenko ◽

Alyona N. ZHIVOTOVA

Keyword(s):

Creative Writing ◽

Working Life ◽

Home Front ◽

Military Operations ◽

Non Fiction ◽

Great Patriotic War ◽

The Face ◽

The University ◽

The Military ◽

Children Of War

In the face of increasing falsification of the Great Patriotic War facts, the evidence of contemporary witnesses and the objective coverage of those events are becoming increasingly important. In this regard, the creative writing by Russian writers and poets is especially significant, especially first and foremost by those who personally took part in combat during the military operations against the Nazi aggression or worked on the home front. The following article is devoted to writers and poets of Tyumen, namely to the alumni and faculty from the University of Tyumen, on whose fate and creative writing the Great Patriotic War left its deep trails, becoming the major topic of their writing. Their names and biographies were revealed in the course of research in 2015-2020. The authors have collected the students’ and academic staff’s stories about their parts in the war and their meditations, which has substantially supplemented the data about the University’s history during the war and its contribution to the Victory. Using the historical biographical and comparative approaches, the authors have studied war-time biographies of the Tyumen authors, presented little known facts of their frontline and working life, as well as analyzed their reflections in the following literary creative work of the Tyumenians, of which memoirs and non-fiction prose have become the most prolific genres. This article comprises biographical data on eleven war veterans, home front workers, and children of war — writers and poets, closely related to one of the leading university of Tyumen and the Tyumen Region.

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Savagery and Nationalism: Native Americans and Popular Fiction

The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930 ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691203188.003.0006 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 136-166

Author(s):

Kate Flint

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Native Americans ◽

Historical Fiction ◽

Popular Fiction ◽

James Fenimore Cooper ◽

Manifest Destiny ◽

The United States ◽

Complicated Case ◽

Victorian Britain ◽

Popular Writing

This chapter explores British popular writing. It considers some of the means by which stereotypes of Indians that emanated from the United States circulated within Britain and were modified and filtered through domestic concerns. The chapter first assesses the influence that James Fenimore Cooper had on transatlantic adventure and historical fiction, and then pass to Charles Dickens's often contradictory treatments of native peoples, before looking at the more complicated case of Mayne Reid. This British writer of popular Westerns employed contemporary American-generated stereotypes of Indians and at times reinforced that country's message of manifest destiny, yet he also managed to question certain political and racial aspects of American life in a way that offered up a warning to his home readership. These stereotypes are read through a consideration of the shifting nuances of the idea of the “savage” in mid-Victorian Britain.

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Stopped Clocks

British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198840923.003.0004 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 79-103

Author(s):

Beryl Pong

Keyword(s):

Short Stories ◽

Home Front ◽

Elizabeth Bowen ◽

Non Fiction ◽

Frank Kermode

Chapter 3 begins by examining a prominent trope in photographs of the home front: the stopped clock. Unpacking the manifold, often competing, meanings of this image—by turns denoting suspension and dislocation, but also temporal resilience and transcendence—it underscores how the photographic medium corroborates or problematizes the temporalities portrayed within its frames. The chapter then turns to the short stories of Elizabeth Bowen and William Sansom, both of whom variously conceived of their own writing as ‘photographic’. Rendering a temporality somewhere between what Frank Kermode, in narratological terms, called ‘tick-tock’ and ‘tock-tick’, Bowen’s and Sansom’s fragmented short stories blended fiction with non-fiction, and were ultimately anthologized as ‘records’ of the war.

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The Tale of Terror and the ‘Medico-Popular’

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474405607.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Megan Coyer

Keyword(s):

Case History ◽

Case Histories ◽

Medical Texts ◽

Medical Case ◽

Non Fiction ◽

Popular Writing ◽

Medical Material

This chapter argues that the ‘tale of terror’ may be read as a form of hybrid ‘medico-popular’ writing to be classed alongside non-fiction medical texts such as Robert Macnish’s The Anatomy of Drunkenness (1827) and The Philosophy of Sleep (1830), as well as one of the most canonical ‘literary’ medical case histories, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822). The first section introduces Macnish’s first medico-literary project in relation to De Quincey’s Confessions, before moving on to an examination of the development of the tale of terror in relation to the type of popular medical material previously published in monthly magazines and the case history tradition. The chapter closes by discussing the engagement with the genre by three medical contributors to Blackwood’s, the surgeons, Robert Macnish (1802–37), John Howison (1797–1859) and William Dunlop (1792–1848).

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