Kate O'Brien and Virginia Woolf: Common Ground

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142
Author(s):  
Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Alignments ◽  
Literary Influences ◽  
Kate O'brien

Convergences in the work of Kate O'Brien and Virginia Woolf range from literary influences and political alignments, to a shared approach to narrative point of view, structure, or conceptual use of words. Common ground includes existentialist preoccupations and tropes, a pacifism which did not hinder support for the left in the Spanish Civil War, the linking of feminism and decolonization, an affinity with anarchism, the identification of the normativity of fascism, and a determination to represent deviant sexualities and affects. Making evident the importance of the connection, O'Brien conceived and designed The Flower of May (1953), one of her most experimental and misunderstood novels, to paid homage to Woolf's oeuvre.

Woolf, Weeping Women, and the European mater dolorosa

2020 ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Gill Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
The Public ◽  
War Photography ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Public Nature ◽  
Public Work ◽  
Film And Video

The gendered maxim ‘men must work and women must weep’ comes from Charles Kingsley's 1851 ballad 'The Three Fishers'. Virginia Woolf appropriated 'Women Must Weep' for early version of Three Guineas, serialised in The Atlantic Monthly (1938). This chapter argues that the public nature of Woolf’s polemical anti-fascist essay may, concurrently, be read as a more intimate document about personal grief and grievance. For Woolf her sister, Vanessa Bell, was the weeping woman, devastated by the tragic death in 1937 of Julian Bell in the Spanish Civil War. Duncan Grant drafted posters (reproduced here) to raise money for refugee Spanish children, employing the trope of mothers cradling babies. Woolf’s contemporary, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, a mother bereaved twice by war, repeated the poignant pietà image in numerous anti-war pieces. Picasso, inspired by Dora Maar whom he regarded privately as ‘the weeping woman’, created sixty mater dolorosa works in preparation for his immense elegiac public work, ‘Guernica’ (1937). The chapter traces the powerful aesthetic of the sorrowful mother as a European anti-war figure. It concludes by considering how this iconography has been used cross-culturally and trans-historically. The pietà has been gender-flipped, adapted and plagiarised in war photography, murals, comic books, manga, fashion, film and video.

scholarly journals Spanish Literature and the Recovery of Historical Memory

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
José M. González
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Spanish Literature ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
History Of

This article analyses the recovery of the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War in the last decade, after so many years of silence, forgetfulness and oblivion. Four points are developed: first, how this recovery is achieved by the civil society in general and by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in particular. Secondly, there is a brief allusion to the quarrel between historians and philosophers about the place of memory and remembrance for the construction of the history of Spain. Thirdly, a reference to the recent Historical Memory Law is made, and finally there is a point about the important role played by literature in recovering the memory of many painful facts of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship from the point of view of the victims.

scholarly journals La justicia de la II República española en guerra. Una aproximación historiográfica

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Enrique Roldán Cañizares
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Basque Country ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Judicial System ◽  
General Point ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
The Government ◽  
Pais Vasco

Resumen: El golpe de Estado militar y el consecuente esta­llido de la guerra civil supusieron el colapso de las estructuras estatales de la II República. Como no podía ser de otro modo, la administración de jus­ticia también se vio afectada por dicho colapso, y tras un periodo de tiempo en el que el Gobierno fue incapaz de tomar las riendas de la situación, un nuevo sistema judicial fue construyéndose poco a poco, cargado de una fuerte impronta popular. En cuanto a la historiografía relativa a la justicia de la República en guerra, podemos encontrar des­de obras generales como la de Ángel Viñas, que, a pesar de tratar la guerra en su conjunto, hacen re­ferencia a la administración de justicia, hasta obras específicas como la de Glicerio Sánchez o Raúl C. Cancio, que se encargan de hacer una recopilación detallada y minuciosa de toda la legislación relativa a los Tribunales Populares. Del mismo modo tam­bién es posible encontrar historiografía especiali­zada en los casos de Cataluña y País Vasco, que por motivos distintos, ocupan un lugar especial dentro de la II República en guerra.Palabras clave: II República, Guerra civil, Tribunales Populares, Justicia, Golpe de Estado, Historiografía.Abstract: The coup d’etat and the subsequent breakout of the Spanish Civil War meant the collapse of the Second Republic’s state structures. The judiciary was affected by the collapse too, and after a pe­riod during which the government was unable to enforce control, a new judicial system was slowly built, a system that was highly characterized by jury courts. Among the historiographical works on justice in the Second Republic in wartime, we can find general works like that of Ángel Viñas, who, besides studying the Spanish civil war from a general point of view, also focuses his work on the judiciary. We can also find specific works, with Glicerio Sánchez and Raúl C. Cancio being good examples. These offer detailed compilations of the laws on Popular Tribunals. Finally, there is historiography on Catalonia and the Basque Country, which, for a variety of reasons, has a special place within the context of the Second Re­public in wartime.Key words: II Republic, civil war, Jury courts, Justice, Coup d’etat, Historiography.

scholarly journals Against Anarchy and Hitler: French Nationalism and Spanish Civil War

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 166-182
Author(s):  
V. E. Molodiakov
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
History Of ◽  
Republican Government ◽  
Charles Maurras

Combination of internal political and social crisis with armed conflict in the neighbour country behind the less dangerous frontier without any possibility of obtaining fastly any real aid from allies is one of the worst possible political scenarios in the time of peace. France faced such a situation in 1936 after her Popular Front’s electoral victory and the beginnig of military mutiny in Spain provoqued by further escalation of internal political struggle. Mutiny developed into civil war that, beeing local geographically, became a global political problem because it troubled many great powers and first of all France. This article depicts and analyzes position and views on Spanish civil war and its antecedents of French nationalist royalist movement «Action française» leaded by Charles Maurras (1868–1952) and her allies in next generations of French nationalists – philosopher and political writer Henri Massis (1886–1970) and novelist Robert Brasillach (1909–1945). All of them from the first day hailed Spanish Nationalist cause and were sure in her final victory so took side against any French help, first of all military, to Spanish Republican government, propagated Franco’s political program, denounced Soviet intervention into Spanish affairs and “Communist threat”. Staying for Catholic and Latin unity French nationalists were anxious to prevent Franco’s rapprochement with Nazi Germany that they regarded as France’s “hereditary emeny” notwithstanding of political regime. Trips of Maurras and Massis to Spain in 1938 and theirs meetings with Franco were aimed to demonstrate this kind of unity with silent but clear anti-German overtone. Brasillach’s “History of War in Spain” (1939) became the first French overview of the events from Nationalist point of view.

scholarly journals A Spanish portrait : Spain and its connections with the thematic and structural dimensions of "For whom the bell tolls"

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Marín Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Structural Dimensions ◽  
Life Itself

After having visited several countries in Europe and Africa, Hemingway found in Spain a land which would play a key role in his later literary career. His first stay in our country in the early twenties would mean the outset of a closed and long relationship with Spain that took almost forty years. During his different travels to Spain, Hemingway had the chance of discovering in the Spanish people a set of values and traits for which he felt a special attraction, such as violence, rebelliousness and, above all, a fatalistic vision of existence where death was inherent to life itself. In his most renowned novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway offers a wider and deeper vision of those characteristics which made the Spanish soul so particular from his point of view. We identify some of them by analyzing the main structural and thematic elements of this novel set in the Spanish Civil War.

Generic images, gendered responses: Virginia Woolf and the representation of belligerent violence

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 228-238
Author(s):  
Naomi Toth
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Affective Reactions ◽  
World War ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Susan Sontag

In Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf voluntarily discusses images of the Spanish Civil War in generic terms. Susan Sontag famously criticized Woolf’s position, claiming that her decision to generalize ‘dismisses politics’, preventing the adoption of a clear anti-fascist stand on the Spanish conflict. I argue, on the contrary, that Woolf’s recourse to the generic turns the spotlight away from the Spanish front in order to make a very political point about the violence of patriarchy that structures the British viewers’ own society. Woolf does this by highlighting the role gendered experiences of the past play in shaping the viewer’s present perception of, and affective reactions to, images of warfare. This allows readers of Woolf’s fiction to more clearly identify the feminist thrust of her depictions of World War I’s impact on the domestic sphere in her novels of the 1920s, To the Lighthouse in particular.

Gabriela Mistral, Virginia Woolf, and the Writing of the Spanish Civil War

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Patricia Novillo-Corvalán
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
International Network ◽  
Gabriela Mistral ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Cultural Communities

This chapter traces the cultural intersections between Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral and Virginia Woolf, particularly through their aesthetic responses to the Spanish Civil War. A search for pacifist visions during the Spanish War led to the creation of transatlantic women’s modernist networks marked by anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-patriarchal ethical engagements. It argues that Mistral and Woolf were part of a web of transnational cultural communities within metropolitan centres such as London and Buenos Aires that were instrumental in the development of an international network of women’s writers preoccupied with the rise of fascism in Europe and the rest of the world.

scholarly journals El terror represivo y el reclutamiento forzoso del ejército golpista. El caso de Galicia, 1936-1939 = The repressive terror and the forced recruitment of the coup army. The case of Galicia, 1936-1939

2020 ◽  
pp. 203
Author(s):  
Francisco J. Leira-Castiñeira
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Control ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
The Creation

Resumen: El golpe de Estado vino acompañado de una cruel represión. Este es un asunto que ha sido ampliamente estudiado por la historiografía española. Sin embargo, los reclutas que tuvieron que ir a combatir de manera forzosa con los insurgentes han recibido escasa atención. Con este artículo se pretende ofrecer otro punto de vista de la represión, analizar cómo pudo afectar al proceso movilizador de un contingente bélico y examinar el sometimiento en Galicia, poniendo el foco en la preparación de la contienda. Como primer avance, el control se realizó primero en las ciudades, en concreto, en la fachada atlántica, permitiendo que se pudiera formar una sociedad de prófugos en los lugares donde no llegó el poder en los primeros meses. Asimismo, el grueso del alistamiento se realizó en los años 1936 y 1937 en Galicia, coincidiendo con los meses de mayor repunte de la coacción. El texto cronológicamente termina cuando aprueban en marzo de 1936 la creación del cuerpo de vigilancia perteneciente al ejército y la dominación comenzó a ser más sistemática y calculadora.Palabras clave: guerra civil española, terror represivo, reclutamiento forzado, huidos, control político.Abstract: The coup d'état was accompanied by a cruel repression. This is an issue that has been widely studied by Spanish historiography. However, the recruits who had to go to combat with the insurgents have received little attention. This article aims to offer another point of view of the repression and analyze how it could affect the mobilizing process of a war contingent and examine the phenomenon of submission in Galicia, focusing on the preparation of the war. The first conclusions were drawn that the control was first carried out in the large cities, specifically, on the Atlantic façade, allowing a kind of fugitive society to be formed in the places where the coup power did not arrive in the first months. Likewise, it is observed how the bulk of the unappealable enlistment was carried out in the years 1936 and 1937 in Galicia, coinciding with the months of greatest recovery of coercion. When the regime approved in March 1936 the creation of the surveillance corps belonging to the army, the domination began to be more systematic and calculating.Keywords: Spanish civil war, repressive terror, forced recruitment, fleeing, political control.

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