39. PROPAGANDA: Christopher Isherwood, Edward Upward, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Edmund White, Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, William Boyd, Graham Greene, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Rohinton Mistry, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Timothy Mo

The Novel ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 912-949

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-173
Author(s):  
Ashley Maher

Though the cross-medium modern style advocated by Herbert Read and Stephen Spender aimed to bring good design to political as well as aesthetic structures, the Ministry of Information mobilized modernist rhetoric for propaganda during World War II. British authors such as Graham Greene and Dylan Thomas scripted films promoting the “new Britain” to be achieved through architecture-led revolution, yet the politicization of style and wartime fears of double agents meant that Elizabeth Bowen, George Orwell, and Christopher Isherwood turned the intense focus on style to their own work. Bowen used the “swastika arms of passage leading to nothing” of the mock-Tudor Holme Dene to scrutinize her memory-laden, late modernist writing, while Orwell and Isherwood directed their attention to streamlined glass and steel structures to contemplate the potential duplicity of their seemingly candid vernacular style.



Author(s):  
Thomas S. Davis

World Film News was a publication that advanced the visibility of the documentary film movement and hosted wide-ranging debates over film, politics, and aesthetics. The magazine was preceded by the Edinburgh based journal Cinema Quarterly (1932–1935) and succeeded by Documentary Newsletter (1940–1947). The first issue was funded by Basil Wright and initially took over the audience for Cinema Quarterly. John Grierson, the brash but passionate leader of the British Documentary Film Movement, exercised editorial control over the magazine, but was careful to include articles by distinguished writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals that might lend a certain gravity to the magazine and his own ambitions. Graham Greene, J. B. Priestley, George Bernard Shaw, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vselovod Pudovkin contributed articles and essays; the magazine also listed W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood as correspondents. As other prominent film journals such as Sight and Sound had ceased to cover documentary films, World Film News became an important venue for propagating ideas about documentary, asserting its cultural sophistication (which was conveyed most baldly by listing its most prominent subscribers and contributors in each issue), and debating technical issues relating to amateur actors, sound, editing, and funding models as well as covering the burgeoning global film scene.



2021 ◽  
Vol IX(257) (75) ◽  
pp. 17-20
Author(s):  
O. Boinitska

The article deals with research of the Catholic revival as a remarkable literary movement that amalgamated a number of authors who discussed problems of the Roman Catholicism in the works of various forms – from serious theological apologies to the popular genres like G.K. Chesterton's detective stories. Such Catholic novelists like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene appeal to the wide readership and interpret the problem of faith in its complex ambivalence, actuality, psychological depth. Whilst Evelyn Waugh is in search for a solid ground in the Old Faith as an alternative to the modern anarchy and chaos, Graham Greene emphasizes on the faith's conflicting ambiguities and contradictions.



2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 397-422
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley

‘The primary object of a novelist is to please’, said Anthony Trollope, but he also wanted to show vice punished and virtue rewarded. More roundly, Somerset Maugham declared that pleasing is the sole purpose of art in general and of the novel in particular, although he granted that novels have been written for other reasons. Indeed, good novels usually embody a worldview, even if only an anarchic or atheist one, and the religious novel is not the only kind to have a dogma at its heart. There is the further issue of literary merit, which certain modern Catholic novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have achieved, giving the lie to Newman’s assertion that in an English Protestant culture, a Catholic literature is impossible. But Newman and his fellow cardinal Wiseman both wrote novels; Wiseman’s novel, Fabiola, with its many translations, had an enthusiastic readership in the College of Cardinals, and was described by the archbishop of Milan as ‘a good book with the success of a bad one’. Victorian Ireland was a predominantly anglophone Catholic country, and despite poor literacy rates into the modern era, the three thousand novels in 1940 in the Dublin Central Catholic Library indicate a sizeable literary culture, comparable to the cultures of other Churches. The ‘literary canons’ who contributed to this literature around 1900 included the Irishman Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan, the subject of this essay; another Irishman, Canon Joseph Guinan, who wrote eight novels on Irish rural life; Canon William Barry, the son of Irish immigrants in London, whose masterpiece was the best-selling feminist novel, The New Antigone; Henry E. Dennehy, commended by Margaret Maison in her classic study of the Victorian religious novel; and the prolific Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, the convert son of an archbishop of Canterbury. Catholic writers were often ignored by the makers of the contemporary Irish literary revival, non-Catholics anxious to separate nationalism from Catholicism (sometimes by appealing to the nation’s pre-Christian past), but this Catholic subculture is now being studied.



2010 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-265
Author(s):  
Donat Gallagher ◽  
Keyword(s):  


Author(s):  
Linden Bicket

For Scottish Catholic writers of the twentieth century, faith was the key influence on both their artistic process and creative vision. Many of these writers trod in the footsteps of Graham Green, Evelyn Waugh and J. R R. Tolkien by converting to Catholicism. This book offers an absorbing history of the uncharted territory that is Scottish Catholic fiction. By focussing on one of the best-known of Scotland’s literary converts, George Mackay Brown, this book explores both the uniquely Scottish Catholic modernist movement of the twentieth century and the particularities of Brown’s writing which have been routinely overlooked by previous studies. George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination provides sustained and illuminating close readings of key texts in Brown’s corpus, and also discusses the importance of Brown’s unpublished early works, manuscripts and letters. It includes detailed comparisons between Brown’s writing and an established canon of Catholic writers, including Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and Flannery O’Connor. Ultimately, this book contextualises Brown’s place within Scottish Catholic writing, while revealing that Brown’s imagination extended far beyond the ‘small green world’ of Orkney, and embraced a universal human experience.



Renascence ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23
Author(s):  
Michael G. Brennan ◽  
Keyword(s):  




2018 ◽  
pp. 124-159
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson

1920s trends discussed in Chapter 3 continue to figure in the next decade, in which the work of J.W Dunne – loosely connected with the popularity of relativity, and proposing a visionary, pre-cognitive understanding of time – exercised an influence over several contemporary authors. Generally, though, 1930s writing moved away from resistance to the minutely-measured temporalities of the clock and towards broader, often nostalgic encounters of memory with history, with some of Virginia Woolf’s later fiction indicating the nature of the change. The long analepsis in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier provides a paradigm for many nostalgic revisitings, in 1930s fiction, of the supposedly-idyllic Edwardian period – in novels by Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, George Orwell and others. Similar patterns of analepsis and idyllic recollection can be found in writing published during and after the Second World War, by authors including Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Cary, Rosamond Lehmann, L.P Hartley and others. Though still occasionally discernible in fiction later in the century, the pattern fades during the following decades, whose difficulties in recalling affirmatively any period within living memory may have constituted a problem for narrative fiction generally.



2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Charles Tharaud
Keyword(s):  


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