Rural Ritual, Gardened Faith: Ford Madox Ford's Memorial Plots

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-264
Author(s):  
Harriet Walters
Keyword(s):  
Rural Community ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Literary Impressionism ◽  
Small Holding ◽  
Post War ◽  
Surrounding Landscape ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Rural England ◽  
Literary Innovation

This article examines the importance of the working country garden to the memorial narratives of Ford Madox Ford. It begins with a study of Ford before the Great War; considering how his particular brand of Literary Impressionism was frequently used to make a case for memorializing the rural poor and their surrounding landscape from The Heart of the Country (1906) to The Fifth Queen saga (1906–08). Moving to Post-War Sussex and Kent, it examines Ford's continuing interest in the country garden and rural community, reading his gardening practices as attempted personal reconstruction through faith in landscape production. As Ford moves from small-holding to small-holding, and eventually away for good, it discusses how the narratives of his part-fictive biographies, including Thus to Revisit (1921) and It was the Nightingale (1934), repeatedly return to rural England to resituate the developments of Literary Impressionism – and Ford's most formative literary friendships – in and about the garden. The repetitions of garden work; of sowing, weeding, and digging over plots, proved essential to Ford's in-text ritualisations of rural life and literary innovation alike.

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 Austro-Hungarian occupation regime in Serbia and its break-down in 1918

Balcanica ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 107-133
Author(s):  
Dimitrije Djordjevic
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

This paper discusses the occupation of Serbia during the First World War by Austro-Hungarian forces. The first partial occupation was short-lived as the Serbian army repelled the aggressors after the Battle of Kolubara in late 1914, but the second one lasted from fall 1915 until the end of the Great War. The Austro-Hungarian occupation zone in Serbia covered the largest share of Serbia?s territory and it was organised in the shape of the Military Governorate on the pattern of Austro-Hungarian occupation of part of Poland. The invaders did not reach a clear decision as to what to do with Serbian territory in post-war period and that gave rise to considerable frictions between Austro-Hungarian and German interests in the Balkans, then between Austrian and Hungarian interests and, finally, between military and civilian authorities within Military Governorate. Throughout the occupation Serbia was exposed to ruthless economic exploitation and her population suffered much both from devastation and from large-scale repression (including deportations, internments and denationalisation) on the part of the occupation regime.

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.

Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economy of ‘Sacrifice’ in the Great War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Sherry
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Major Point ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
Official Record ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Point Of Reference

This essay engages the values, attitudes, and practices of ‘sacrifice’ in the cultural history and literary and visual representations of the Great War (discussing works by Richard Aldington, David Jones and Ford Madox Ford). It demonstrates how extensively the idea of sacrifice was appealed to in the official record, and it shows how this political construction was responded to, almost always critically and negatively, in a literature of major record. The chief ideas turn around the fact that a sacrificial victim, in order to be effective, needs to be ‘worth’ a good deal; this calculation is profoundly altered in the ongoing, increasingly wholesale character of slaughter in the war. This disenchantment provides a major point of reference for our understanding of the war as a watershed in European and world-cultural history.

“Why Can't I Have the Vote?”

2017 ◽  
pp. 117-144
Author(s):  
Argha Kumar Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Women's Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Political Differences ◽  
Political Conviction ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

The First World War came at a crucial time when British women's suffrage campaigns were gathering momentum throughout the country. The culmination of the movement during these years, in spite of various social and political differences, enhanced female solidarity and political consciousness to a considerable degree. Hectic political activism also witnessed a phenomenal rise and propagation of an exclusive and extraordinary women's culture. The onset of the Great War however, struck a fatal blow to such an unprecedented female camaraderie and political conviction. My proposed chapter traces and gathers evidences in women's verse written during this time period extending from the pre-war years of the suffrage movement to the early years of the post-war demobilisation correlating them with some of the major developments in women's socio-political history of the period.

Fighting for the Empire

2019 ◽  
pp. 16-42
Author(s):  
Dónal Hassett
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
The Political ◽  
Great War ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

This chapter explores the history of military service in Algeria and across the colonial world before and during the Great War. It introduces the reader to key concepts from the fields of colonial history and First World War studies that are crucial to understanding the political legacies of the entanglement of the colonies and, especially, Algeria with the Great War. Taking a comparative approach, it explains the range of legal categories that underpinned colonial rule within the different empires and considers how the rights and responsibilities they implied were connected to and altered by military service. The chapter also examines the variety of attitudes toward the use of colonial soldiers in the different imperial polities and asks how these influenced the expectations of post-war reform in the colonies.

scholarly journals The Marquis of Anglesey: working and social relationships on a Dorset estate (c. 1812–1844)

Rural History ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-150
Author(s):  
Carol Beardmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Rural Community ◽  
Close Relationships ◽  
Agricultural History ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Working Relationships ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Standing Timber

Abstract The Marquis of Anglesey on his Dorset estate was an absentee landlord who maintained close relationships with his estate through extensive correspondence with his land agent William Castleman. The surviving letters are a very rich source by which to examine the minutiae of rural life and a way to reconstruct social and working relationships within the nineteenth-century English landed estate. By focusing on a range of customary and unwritten rights, this article will consider issues such as how tenants navigated renegotiation of their leases, sought rent abatements or compensation for damage to their crops from hunting. Working and social relationships on such an estate were closely interlinked, as is widely shown here. The article also raises more contentious estate issues such as who had the rights to fallen and standing timber, the customs affecting courts, the repair of churches, and the responsibilities for building and maintaining schools. Throughout, the issue of ‘social control’ is assessed. Together the range of documented work and social interactions provide a fuller picture of the functioning of a southern English great estate in the early nineteenth century, and allow us to examine this rural community beyond the remit of its agricultural history.

The Great War and Paramilitarism in Europe, 1917–23

2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT GERWARTH ◽  
JOHN HORNE
Keyword(s):  
Global Perspective ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Great War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this comparative conclusion, the authors consider some of the most influential trends in the historiography of political and paramilitary violence, with particular reference to the relationship between wartime and post-war violence. The heuristic value of the ‘aftershocks’ metaphor is considered, as are the advantages (and potential pitfalls) of the contributors’ transnational approach. Finally, the authors suggest an agenda for future research on paramilitary violence, which looks at the phenomenon in a global perspective.

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