scholarly journals Two 1916s: Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Allison Haas

As Paul Fussell has shown, the First World War was a watershed moment for 20th century British history and culture. While the role of the 36th (Ulster) Division in the Battle of the Somme has become a part of unionist iconography in what is now Northern Ireland, the experience of southern or nationalist Irish soldiers in the war remains underrepresented. Sebastian Barry’s 2005 novel, A Long Long Way is one attempt to correct this historical imbalance. This article will examine how Barry represents the relationship between the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising through the eyes of his politically-conflicted protagonist, Willie Dunne. While the novel at first seems to present a common war experience as a means of healing political divisions between Ireland and Britain, this solution ultimately proves untenable. By the end of the novel, Willie’s hybrid English–Irish identity makes him an outcast in both places, even as he increasingly begins to identify with the Irish nationalist cause. Unlike some of Barry’s other novels, A Long Long Way does not present a disillusioned version of the early 20th century Irish nationalism. Instead, Willie sympathizes with the rebels, and Barry ultimately argues for a more inclusive Irish national identity.

Author(s):  
Ann Herndon Marshall

During both world wars, Elizabeth von Arnim sought sanctuary in Albemarle County, Virginia. The country house, Clover Fields, left its mark on her war novel Christine. She struggled with her own grief as she wrote of Christine’s trials. The war experience underlying the novel comes into clearer focus when compared with the writing of two contemporaries who were equally affected by the First World War, Katherine Mansfield and Vera Brittain. On her second visit to Virginia at age 73, she was again an exile, this time from home in France. As in 1917, she was angry at the American reluctance to enter the war. Preoccupied with her dog Billy, she found a perfect landlady and developed a fascination with Virginia author Amélie Rives. The resemblance of a Charlottesville man to her long-dead husband Henning evoked nostalgia for her days in Prussia and allowed her to reconcile with Henning’s ghost in a way reminiscent of Fanny Skeffington’s late equanimity.


2015 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 27-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radhika Singha

AbstractThis essay adds the story of the Indian Labour Corps (ILC) to the narratives of the various “coloured” units brought in to France to deal with the manpower crisis that had overtaken that theater of the First World War in 1916. The label “coloured” or “native labour” justified inferior care and a harsher work and disciplinary regime than that experienced by white labor. However, official reports and newspaper coverage also expose a dense play of ethnographic comparison between the different colored corps. The notion was that to “work” natives properly, the managerial regimes peculiar to them also had to be imported into the metropolis. The register of comparison was also shaped by specific political and social agendas which gave some colored units more room than others to negotiate acknowledgement of their services. One dimension of the war experience for Indian laborers was their engagement with institutional and ethnic categorizations. The other dimension was the process of being made over into military property and the workers own efforts to reframe the environments, object worlds, and orders of time within which they were positioned. By creating suggestive equivalences between themselves and other military personnel, they sought to lift themselves from the status of coolies to that of participants in a common project of war service. At the same time, they indicated that they had not put their persons at the disposal of the state in exactly the same way as the sepoy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-406
Author(s):  
Dobrosława Antonów

The paper draws attention to one of the emergency taxes in the history of the Polish Treasury, i.e. a tax on war profits. It was levied under the Decree of 5 February 1919 on the Establishment of a Tax on War Profits. This levy introduced a concept which was developed in Europe and built on the First World War experience. In the reborn Poland, the tax was supposed to have two functions: fiscal — as a source of financing the extraordinary expenditure arising from the war against the Soviets and a social function — as an additional burden on those taxpayers who were able to accumulate wealth and earn substantial profits as a result of the First World War.


Modern Italy ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanda Wilcox

Emotion plays a vital role in any rounded history of warfare, both as an element in morale and as component in understanding the soldier's experience. Theories on the functioning of emotions vary, but an exploration of Italian soldiers' emotions during the First World War highlights both cognitive and cultural elements in the ways emotions were experienced and expressed. Although Italian stereotypes of passivity and resignation dominated contemporary discourse concerning the feelings and reactions of peasant conscripts, letters reveal that Italian soldiers vividly expressed a wide range of intense emotions. Focusing on fear, horror and grief as recurrent themes, this article finds that these emotions were processed and expressed in ways which show similarities to the combatants of other nations but which also display distinctly Italian features. The language and imagery commonly deployed offer insights into the ways in which Italian socio-cultural norms shaped expressions of personal war experience. In letters that drew on both religious imagery and the traditional peasant concerns of land, terrain and basic survival, soldiers expressed their fears of death, isolation, suffering and killing in surprisingly vigorous terms.


Author(s):  
Gemma Moss

Women exerted a considerable influence on Maurice, even though admirable female characters are absent from the narrative. Before the First World War, a sexually conservative reform movement called Social Purity was bringing male sexuality under particular scrutiny, making this a difficult time for Forster to be claiming that homosexuality was not morally wrong. Interpreted against this background, Maurice can be read not as a rebellion against attenuated Victorian attitudes or against women but as a challenge to the contemporary social purity movement. In this context – the difficulty of talking about homosexuality, of which the novel explores the effects – the willingness of Forster’s friend and confidante, Florence Barger, to discuss homosexuality also needs to be seen as significant. She contributed to Forster’s ability to represent homosexuality as a valid alternative to bourgeois masculinity that equated heterosexuality with morality, health and economic success.


2001 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 193-208
Author(s):  
John Skorupski

The early part of the twentieth century was as revolutionary in the domain of ethical ideas as in other realms. An ethical culture inherited from the preceding century was to all appearance destroyed. This culture, the high-bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century, had emerged gradually from years of revolution and counter-revolution, and seemed then to be developing steadily and expanding its reach towards the end of the century and up to the first world war. Yet what followed it, and in fact overlapped with it, being already presaged well before the war, was quite other: the mainly 20th century phase we call ‘Modernism’, acutely fragmented not only in aesthetic but also in ethical terms, marked in politics by nationalist, collectivist and populist clashes. However, Modernism too, and in particular, many of the ideas in ethics which were characteristic of it, now belongs to history. That much has for some time been clear; the change is complicated, confused, hard to outline; discernibly though, we're in a new period and have been for perhaps a third of a century—quite how long depends on which aspect of change one considers, and on how one interprets its character.


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