Writing Life: Early Twentieth-Century Autobiographies of the Artist-Hero

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mhairi Pooler
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First World

Writing Life offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and Modernism via the First World War, this study offers a new way of evaluating biographical context and experience in the individual creative process at a critical point in world and literary history. Writing Life is also the story of four literarily and personally interconnected writers – Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson – and how and why they variously adapted the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, or artist narrative, for their autobiographical writing, reimagining themselves as artist-heroes. By appropriating key features of the genre to underpin their autobiographical narratives, Writing Life examines how these writers achieve a form of life-writing that is equally a life story, artist’s manifesto, aesthetic treatise and modern autobiographical Künstlerroman. Pooler argues that by casting their autobiographical selves in this role, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson shift the focus of their life-stories towards art and its production and interpretation, each one conducting a Romantic-style conversation about literature through literature as a means of reconfirming the role of the artist in the face of shifting values and the cataclysm of the Great War.

Moments of Insight in Long Novels by Henry James and Dorothy Richardson

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-315
Author(s):  
Kate McLoughlin
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
World War ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Portrait Of A Lady ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
First World

Henry James and Dorothy Richardson wrote long novels in response to what they perceived as a crisis in transferable experience, a crisis traced by Walter Benjamin to the First World War. The scenes under discussion may, prima facie, seem to articulate what Benjamin termed Erlebnis (experience in the raw) or Jetztzeit (‘now-time’, in which the entire history of mankind is encompassed). However, the scenes (which occur in James's The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove and in Richardson's Honeycomb and Dimple Hill from the Pilgrimage sequence) in fact depict Erfahrung (the wise yield of reflected-upon experience). Furthermore, the novels’ lengthiness inculcates Erfahrung in the reader, too, who achieves insight based upon memory, resemblance, repetition and recognition across these long texts.

Socialism and Civilized Society

Leonard Woolf ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 161-187
Author(s):  
Fred Leventhal ◽  
Peter Stansky
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Cooperative Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
Greater Good ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
East End ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Fabian Society ◽  
First World

Leonard’s autobiography reveals his apolitical upbringing, although exposure to East End poverty and the experience of the First World War turned him into a political animal. The Fabian Society and the Cooperative movement converted him to socialism, while he continued to cherish the conviction that there is no higher value than the individual. He always defined civilization by reference to fifth-century Athens, which embraced freedom, equality, and tolerance. It was this belief that led him to deplore Stalinism as a travesty of Marxist objectives. In his later political writings, imbued with anti-communist sentiments, he argued that it was never right to do a great evil so that a greater good might result, a view that prompted heated exchanges with Kingsley Martin. In addition to writing polemical books and articles, he devoted more than thirty years to his magnum opus, the two-volume After the Deluge and its successor Principia Politica, a resounding defense of liberal values in the face of human aggression and an exploration of communal psychology, whose prolixity received a cool reception from critics.

Naming the Dead, Writing the Individual: Classical Traditions and Commemorative Practices in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
GRAHAM OLIVER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Classical Traditions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
War Commemoration ◽  
First World

The chapter focuses on the commemoration of the individual in ancient and modern cultures. It argues that the attitude to individual commemoration adopted by the War Graves Commission in the First World War in Britain can be linked to the commemorative practices of ancient Greece, emphasising the importance of the part played by Sir Frederic Kenyon. The chapter draws on examples of commemoration from classical Athens, twentieth-century Britain and the Soviet Union in order to explore the different roles that the commemoration of the individual has played in ancient and modern forms of war commemoration.

‘The Very Complexion of the Mirror’

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Mhairi Pooler
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Self ◽  
World War ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Reflective Surface ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Mixed Genre ◽  
The Moment ◽  
First World

The introduction’s title is taken from a quote by Henry James that underlines the book’s focus on the self-theorising artist: the idea that autobiographical writing shows the author’s mirrored reflection as well as an examination of the reflective surface itself. This idea is introduced alongside other key themes of the book, including the concern with genre, especially the mixed genre of ‘creative autobiography’ and how it compares with the Künstlerroman. The choice of authors studied and their interconnections are explained. It is described how each of the works focused on is a response to the moment of its composition – to the new century, to the shock of the First World War, to the experiments in self-expression or to the uncertainty of the interwar years – making Hans Georg Gadamer’s notion of the ‘historical horizon’ important to the study. This discussion dwells on Virginia Woolf’s idea that ‘human character changed’ in 1910.

Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. xii + 331 pp.

2020 ◽  
pp. 334-339
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
First World War ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
First World ◽  
Sense Of Obligation

It is common wisdom, both in scholarly historiography and in hagiography, that Ze’ev Jabotinsky was the founding father of the Israeli Right. In fact, as Colin Shindler’s excellent book proves, Jabotinsky adopted a right-wing world view only in the 1920s. Prior to the First World War, while undoubtedly a Zionist, he was also a man of cosmopolitan views. It was during a sojourn in Italy that he was caught up in the spirit of nationalism; Garibaldi’s influence was prior to Herzl’s. Moreover, whereas Jabotinsky’s heirs, Menachem Begin most prominently, paid lip service to his heritage, they were not entirely his disciples. Jabotinsky’s thinking largely lost its relevance in the face of the changing historical circumstances in which Begin and others operated. And so, with the passage of years following Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, there was an ever-lessened sense of obligation to the leader and his legacy....

The Literature of War

Worldview ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 14-22
Author(s):  
Mark Taylor
Keyword(s):  
The Waste Land ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
War Novels ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Imaginative Literature ◽  
Farewell To Arms ◽  
Good Soldier ◽  
First World

The literature of the First World War, to begin with that one, illustrates a tragic paradox: The most destructive of human enterprises can nourish the most creative. Probably no single event in history allowed the transformation of so many intense personal experiences—often presented for outspokenly didactic reasons or as cries of impotent frustration or as necessary therapy—into works of art that transcended the limited circumstances of their birth. No responsible account of this century's imaginative literature could omit Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, William Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay and A Fable, Emest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, William March's Company K, Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier: Schweik, Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grisha, or the lyric poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Charles Hamilton Sorley. To this list might be added such seminal works of modernism as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. These are not “war poems” or “war novels,“ in any narrow sense, but they clearly would not exist had there been no war.

scholarly journals On the crossroad of avant-garde: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and his painting  “Potsdamer Platz”

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Анастасия Юрьевна Королева
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
German Art ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Potsdamer Platz ◽  
The City ◽  
First World

Статья посвящена изучению картины Эрнста Людвига Кирхнера Потсдамская площадь . Автор ставит своей задачей исследование историко-культурного контекста произведения, занимающего столь важное положение в истории немецкого искусства. Это полотно, написанное в год начала Первой мировой войны, обобщает впечатления недавно приехавшего в Берлин художника от сверхинтенсивной жизни германской столицы последних предвоенных лет. В статье подробно рассматривается история возникновения и роль площади в культурном и мифологическом ландшафте города, анализируется социальный статус героев картины, отмечаются автобиографические коннотации и характерные для нее формально-стилевые приемы. В результате автор приходит к выводу об особом значении образа города в лице Потсдамской площади как символа эпохи. In researching of painting of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Potsdamer Platz the author sets a task to find out all of historical and cultural aspects of this so important picture in German art. It was painted in the year of the beginning of the First World War, after a few year of the artists arriving in Berlin and become the kind of generalization of Kirchners impressions of the extremely intense life of German capital in the latest prewar years. The article gives the attention to the history of the square and its role in the cultural and mythological landscape of the city. Also it analyzes the social status of the main personas, notes the autobiographical aspects and specific formal and stylistic receptions. The results shows, that the image of town in the face of Potsdamer Platz becomes a symbol of the epoch.

scholarly journals Beyond the Warring States

Asian Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-77
Author(s):  
Ady Van den Stock
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Modern Chinese Intellectual History ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First World

The intellectual impact of the First World War in China is often understood as having led to a disenchantment with the West and a discrediting of the authority of “science”, while at the same time ushering in a renewed sense of cultural as well as national “awakening”. Important developments such as the May Fourth Movement, the rise of Chinese Marxism, and the emergence of modern Confucianism have become integral parts of the narrative surrounding the effects of the “European War” in China, and bear witness to the contested relation between tradition and modernity in twentieth-century Chinese thought. Through a case study of a number of wartime and post-war texts written by the “cultural conservative” thinker and publicist Du Yaquan (1873–1933), this paper tries to draw attention to the complexity and occasional ambiguity of responses to the “Great War” in modern Chinese intellectual history. More specifically, the following pages offer an analysis of Du’s critique of “materialism” in the context of his quest for social freedom and cultural continuity, his enduring commitment to scientific notions of social evolution and political governance, and his approach to the relations among war, the nation-state, the individual, and the international interstate order developed against the background of the First World War.

scholarly journals Managing the remains of citizen soldiers

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-51
Author(s):  
Adrien Douchet ◽  
Taline Garibian ◽  
Benoît Pouget
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Individual Identification ◽  
World War ◽  
Health Authorities ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Citizen Soldiers ◽  
Public Health Authorities ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First World ◽  
Shed Light

The aim of this article is to shed light on the conditions under which the funerary management of human remains was carried out by the French authorities during the early years of the First World War. It seeks to understand how the urgent need to clear the battlefield as quickly as possible came into conflict with the aspiration to give all deceased an individualised, or at the very least dignified, burial. Old military funerary practices were overturned and reconfigured to incorporate an ideal that sought the individual identification of citizen soldiers. The years 1914–15 were thus profoundly marked by a clash between the pragmatism of public health authorities obsessed with hygiene, the infancy of emerging forensic science, the aching desire of the nation to see its children buried individually and various political and military imperatives related to the conduct of the war.

scholarly journals Gry pamięci. Valiant Hearts: The Great War i My Memory of Us w perspektywie kultury historycznej

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (38) ◽  
pp. 144-160
Author(s):  
Marcin Pigulak
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Press ◽  
Historical Culture ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

The paper aims to outline how video games Valiant Hearts: The Great War (Ubisoft Montpellier, 2014) and My Memory of Us (Juggler Games, 2018) use narrative and ludic structures to create commemorative stories about the First World War and the Second World War. The author refer to the concept of historical culture (among others, in Jörn Rüsen’s interpretation) and examine the connections between the two video games focusing on the issue of designers’ intentions (digital games as examples of the commemoration of the past), the genre similarity (2D platform games), the intermedial convergence and the press reception. He discusses the strategy of the cultural agreement between designers and users, analyzes historical narratives as a part of the gameplay, examines relations between the individual and collective’s perspective and characterizes immersion’s mechanisms which reinforce players’ identification with the victims of both wars.

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