Disappearing Bodies in White Rose and the Red

Author(s):  
Lara Vetter

In her second postwar novel, H.D. creates a layered historical narrative of the wars and uprisings of the mid-nineteenth century; the Crusades of the Middle Ages; and, implicitly, the Second World War and the partitioning of India and Pakistan. A story of Elizabeth Siddall and the Pre-Raphaelites, the novel relies upon the historical backdrop of the Crimean War and the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India to destabilize the narrative and to emphasize a series of dismemberments of female bodies. Siddall and India itself are fragmented, abstracted, and aetherialized to the point of nonexistence.

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn

Over her career, Elizabeth Bowen published ten novels, yet she left no comprehensive theory of the novel. This essay draws especially upon ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (1945), ‘The Technique of the Novel’ (1953), and ‘Truth and Fiction’ (1956), as well as opinions that Bowen expressed in her weekly book columns for The Tatler, to formulate her key perceptions of, and rules for, writing a novel. Bowen defined her ideas by drawing upon the empirical evidence of novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Manning, H.E. Bates, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and numerous others. She gave particular thought to ‘situation’, by which she means the central problematic or the crux of the story. The situation precedes and fuels plot. The Second World War, Bowen claimed in her essays and reviews, had a decisive influence on heroism and contemporary fiction by heightening its scale and its repertory of situations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Myroslav Shkandrij

<p class="EW-abstract"><strong>Abstract:</strong> When Dokia Humenna’s novel depicting the Second World War, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em> (Khreshchatyk Ravine), was published in New York in 1956, it created a controversy. Readers were particularly interested in the way activists of the OUN were portrayed. This article analyzes readers’ comments and Humenna’s responses, which are today stored in the archives of the Ukrainian Academy of Science in New York. The novel is based on a diary Humenna kept during the German occupation of Kyiv in the years 1941-1943.</p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Dokia Humenna, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em>, Second World War, OUN, Émigré Literature, Reader Response


Author(s):  
Cairns Craig

Muriel Spark has regularly been described as a Catholic novelist, given that her conversion to Catholicism was followed closely by the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, about the struggles of a Catholic convert. However, the intellectual context in which she came to maturity in the years after the Second World War was pervaded by the issues raised by existentialism, issues which surface directly in her novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Existentialism is now associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an atheistic philosophy, but it began as a Christian philosophy inspired by nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism which shaped Spark’s own ‘leap to faith’ and his ironic style which shaped her own approach to the novel form.


2020 ◽  
pp. 001083672090438
Author(s):  
Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou ◽  
Felix Berenskötter

This article scrutinizes the assumption that friends support each other in times of war. Picking up the notion that solidarity, or ‘other-help’, is a key feature of friendship between states, the article explores how states behave when a friend is attacked by an overwhelming enemy. It directs attention to the trade-off between solidarity and self-help that governments face in such a situation and makes the novel argument that the decision about whether and how to support the friend is significantly influenced by assessments of the distribution of material capabilities and the relationship the state has with the aggressor. This proposition is supported empirically in an examination of Sweden’s response to its Nordic friends’ need for help during the Second World War – to Finland during the 1939–1940 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union, and to Norway following the invasion of Germany from 1940 to 1945.


1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Whittier Treat

In ōta yōko's (1903?–63) novel Han-ningen (Half-Human, 1954) the heroine, named Oda Atsuko, is like author Ōta herself a famous A-bomb writer suffering from severe depression. She enters the hospital in an attempt to cure an addiction to tranquilizers whose intemperate use derives from very real, but to the medical profession opaque, neuroses ultimately due to the trauma of Hiroshima. No treatment proves totally effective. Medicine can only hope to counter illness, not history, and Oda's deepest torments remain chronic. She continues to be plagued by a frustration linked in the novel's fifth chapter with the choices she has faced in the seven years since the end of the Second World War: suicide, flight, or the writing of a “good work of literature.” Throughout the novel Oda dismisses suicide as not in her nature; Ota, in her essay “Ikinokori no shinri” (The psychology of survival, 1952), concludes that no Japanese writer can abandon Japan, and her heroine here concurs. Of Oda's three alternatives all that is left is the writing of a good work, but that too seems elusive. What constitutes “good” is unclear. Just how she might recognize such a work (ii sakuhin to wa nanimono ka) is a literary problem inextricably bound with Oda's physical and psychological problems, and all have arisen from her presence at Hiroshima's destruction on August 6, 1945.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 947-967
Author(s):  
Gülcan Yücedağ

After the Second World War in Germany, guest worker migrations came into question. In recent years, the refugee problem in Europe in general and Germany in particular has been attracting attention. However, German history has a much richer content in terms of migration and migrant types. It is possible to say that the content of migration varies according to factors such as the way of migration, the duration of stay in the target country, and distance. Meanwhile, the definition of migrant is also classified in relation to religious, political, national or ethnic identities. This study traces the migration and migrant facts in German history since the Middle Ages. Although Germany received a high rate of migration, until recently it has not called itself as a migration country. Despite that, this paper aims to show that Germany was not independent from the types of migration and migrants also in the past. Therefore, the reflections of migration and migrant facts in German history are researched. In this article, the literature review is done and the data are descriptively analysed. In the Middle Ages, the mobility of the nobility, clergy, students and merchants attracts attention. Forced migration and immigration to America and the impact of industrialization on migration are other important issues. The types of migration and migrants that gained importance during and after the First World War include diversity. Millions of refugees created by the Second World War, guest worker migrations with international treaties after the war, ethnic Germans’ remigration after the Cold War, and the current refugee problem are important reflections in German history related to migration and migrant facts. ​Extended English summary is in the end of Full Text PDF (TURKISH) file. Özet Almanya’da İkinci Dünya Savaşı’ndan sonra misafir işçi göçleri gündeme gelmiştir. Yakın zamanda ise genel olarak Avrupa, özel olarak Almanya’da mülteci sorunu dikkat çekmektedir. Bununla birlikte Alman tarihi, göç ve göçmen türleri açısından çok daha zengin bir içeriğe sahiptir. Göçün içeriğinin göç etme biçimi, hedef ülkede kalış süresi, mesafe gibi faktörlere göre değiştiğini söylemek mümkündür. Buna paralel olarak göçmen tanımı da dini, siyasi, ulusal veya etnik kimliklerle ilişkili olarak sınıflandırılır. Bu çalışma, Ortaçağ’dan günümüze kadar Alman tarihinde göç ve göçmen olgularının izi sürmektedir. Almanya, yüksek oranda göç almasına rağmen, yakın zamana kadar kendisini bir göç ülkesi olarak adlandırmamıştır. Bununla birlikte, bu çalışma Almanya’nın, geçmişte de göçlerden ve göçmenlerden bağımsız olmadığını göstermeyi hedeflemektedir. Bu nedenle, göç ve göçmen olgularının Alman tarihindeki yansımaları incelenmiştir. Bu çalışmada literatür taraması yapılarak veriler betimsel analize tabi tutulmuştur. Ortaçağ’da soyluların, din adamlarının, öğrencilerin ve tüccarların hareketliliği dikkat çekmektedir. Zorunlu göçler ve Amerika’ya yönelen göçler ile sanayileşmenin göçe etkisi önem taşıyan diğer konulardır. Birinci Dünya Savaşı ve sonrasında öne çıkan göç türleri ve göçmenlik hâlleri çeşitlilik içermektedir. İkinci Dünya Savaşı’nın yarattığı milyonlarca mülteci, savaş sonrasında uluslararası anlaşmalarla gerçekleşen misafir işçi göçleri, Soğuk Savaş sonrasında etnik Almanların geri göçü ve günümüz mülteci sorunu, göç ve göçmen olgularının Alman tarihindeki önemli yansımalarıdır.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-312
Author(s):  
Chris O'Rourke

The crime film Murder! (1930), directed by Alfred Hitchcock for British International Pictures and based on the novel Enter Sir John (1929) by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, has long been cited in debates about the treatment of queer sexuality in Hitchcock's films. Central to these debates is the character of Handel Fane and the depiction of his cross-dressed appearances as a theatre and circus performer, which many critics have understood as a coded reference to homosexuality. This article explores such critical interpretations by situating Murder! more firmly in its historical context. In particular, it examines Fane's cross-dressed performances in relation to other cultural representations of men's cross-dressing in interwar Britain. These include examples from other British and American films, stories in the popular press and the publicity surrounding the aerial performer and female impersonator Barbette (Vander Clyde). The article argues that Murder! reflects and exploits a broader fascination with gender ambiguity in British popular culture, and that it anticipates the more insistent vilification of queer men in the decades after the Second World War.


Porównania ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mária Bátorová

Hronský’s work was written in Rome at the beginning of his journey until emigration in 1947/48. This, in terms of genre and content, is a distinctive form: an autobiographical tale through which the author erected a memorial. Andreas Búr embodies the capabilities and tragedy of the author. The sacrifice for the people who kill him bears in itself a Christian pathos and at the same time the extinction of everything the author was. His character remains in the memory of the people as the myth of an ethical act. Tatarka’s work was written in Slovakia in 1948. This critique of conventional Christianity, which has tragic consequences for a defenceless woman and her children, is linked with criticism of the author Hronský in the novel Andreas Búr Majster. The movement towards the myth of truth begins in Tatarka immediately at the time of thawing after Stalin’s death in the essay “Démon súhlasu” (The Demon of Conformity) and ends in the author’s 19 years of “life in truth” and the victim of a life without civil rights.


2020 ◽  
pp. 372-388
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Czyżak

The article contains considerations regarding memory of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary prose and analyses the arguments for and against fictitious representations of theShoah. The author discusses the changes in treating fiction which narrates the history of Jewish people during the Second World War – from works of fiction published after the war (e.g. Wielki Tydzień by Jerzy Andrzejewski) to popular thrillers written in the 21st century. The main part of this article is devoted to a novel Tworki written by Marek Bieńczyk in 1999, telling a story of young people – Poles and Jews – employed in a mental hospital during German occupation. The novel was at the centre stage of discussion about relationship between fiction and the Shoah theme, yet the author of the article argues that it may serve as an important stepping stone in exemplifying history. This literary vision of the Holocaust (defined as “pastoral thriller”) shows educational possibilities of fiction.


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