scholarly journals ANDEN VERDENSKRIG FORTALT FOR BØRN OG UNGE - HISTORIEFORTOLKNINGER I NYERE DANSK BØRNELITTERATUR

1970 ◽  
Vol 42 (117) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Anna Karlskov Skyggebjerg
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
World War ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Time Gap ◽  
Second World

SECOND WORLD WAR NARRATED FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNGSTERS. INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY IN NEW DANISH LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN | Children’s books about the Second World War have been written and published ever since it ended. One would perhaps imagine that the ever-increasing distance from it would mean a waning interest, but that does not seem to be the case. Over the last few years, a whole range of remarkable children’s books have appeared in Denmark. New things can still be written about this period, and the time gap can be said to have had the effect of freeing up material. This should not be taken as meaning that newer books are less reliable, historically speaking, but rather that they present the period in a new light. In this article a number of recent Danish novels will be discussed with respect to how they deal with history. It is not the intention to try to make non-fiction out of historical novels for children, which would mean reading the books in a manner which was at variance with the genre they belong to, but one of the premises of the article is that the historical novel is to be understood as a form of discourse lying somewhere between history and pure fiction. The historical novel is seen as a piece of fiction presenting one or several interpretations of a given period of history by setting its story in a particular context.

scholarly journals “Making Nonsense of the Little Categories”: Slaughterhouse-Five and The Memoirs of a Survivor as autobiographical science fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Georgia Hight
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Living Room ◽  
World War ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

<p>Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) are both novels that blend autobiography with science fiction. In a review of Vonnegut’s Mother Night, Lessing writes that he “makes nonsense of the little categories”. The same applies to Lessing. These two novels live in the porous borders between genre—between fiction and non-fiction.  Vonnegut writes that he can’t remember much of his experiences in the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War. The war novel he writes about them has a protagonist who is “unstuck in time”. I frame my discussion of Slaughterhouse around problems of temporal and narrative ordering. Through use of fractured time, repetitions, and the chronotope, Vonnegut finds a way to express his missing and traumatic memories of the war.  Lessing’s memories are of her early childhood in Persia and Southern Rhodesia. These memories are warped, claustrophobic, and difficult to articulate. Like Slaughterhouse, Memoirs fractures time and space. I organise my discussion of Lessing’s novel around the latter, focusing on a literalised porous border: her dissolving living room wall. Borders and portals between spaces in Memoirs blend the dystopian, science-fiction world of the city with the world of Lessing’s memories; dreams with reality; and the static with the dynamic.  I pose several answers to the question of why science fiction and autobiography. A shared occupation of the two authors was a concern for the madness and dissolution of society, and science fiction engages in a tradition of expressing these concerns. Additionally, Vonnegut and Lessing use the tools of a genre in which it is acceptable for time and space to be warped or fractured. These tools not only allow for the expression of memories that are fragmented, difficult, and half forgotten, but produce worlds that mirror the form of these personal memories.</p>

Africa on Film to 1940

1987 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 189-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew D. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
African History ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnographic Films ◽  
Second World ◽  
Cutoff Date ◽  
The U.S

In the course of bibliographical work on volume 7 of the Cambridge History of Africa, I realized that there was no guide to film as a historical source for this or any other period in African history. Lists had been made of films on Africa available for loan or hire in the U.S.A., but no one had tried to list at all comprehensively what had actually been made or what had survived. I therefore decided to compile such a guide myself, tracing the making of non–fiction film in Africa from early days up to 1940: this seemed a suitable cutoff date, since it was clear that from the Second World War the scale of filmmaking in Africa, as elsewhere, increased very considerably, and in any case was beginning to attract the attention of historians.I was emboldened in this project by the publication in 1980 of the non–fiction catalog of the British National Film Archive. This immediately showed that a wide variety of relevant films had been not only made, but preserved, and for several there are viewing as well as archive copies. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent published catalog for any other major film archive. I have been able, however, to glean much information from a variety of guides, filmographies, and historical studies. Among lists of films in archival collections, the most useful were those in the U.S. of UNESCO for ethnographic films, McClintock for films on North Africa, and South's guide to African materials in the U.S. federal archives.

scholarly journals Liminal and Transmodern Female Voices at War: Resistant and Healing Female Bonds in Libby Cone’s War on the Margins (2008)

Societies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 114
Author(s):  
Silvia Pellicer-Ortín
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
World War ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
War Narratives ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
Second World

When addressing marginal experiences during the Second World War, the German occupation of the Channel Islands deserves pride of place, as very few writers have represented that liminal side of the conflict. One of these few writers is Libby Cone, who published War on the Margins in 2008, a historical novel set on Jersey during this occupation and whose main protagonist encounters various female characters resisting the occupation from a variety of marginal positions. Drawing from Rodríguez Magda’s distinction between “narratives of celebration” and “narratives of the limit”, the main claim behind this article is that liminality is a general recourse in transmodern fiction, but in Cone’s War on the Margins it also acts as a fruitful strategy to represent female bonds as promoters of empathy, resilience and resistance. First, this study will demonstrate how liminality works at a variety of levels and it will identify some of the specific features characterizing transmodern war narratives. Then, the female bonds represented will be examined to prove that War on the Margins relies on female solidarity when it comes to finding resilient attitudes to confront war. Finally, this article will elaborate on how Cone uses these liminal features to voice the difficult experiences that Jewish and non-Jewish women endured during the Second World War, echoing similar conflictive situations of other women in our transmodern era.

J. G. Farrell's Indian Works: His Majesty's Subjects?

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 407-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
World War ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Second World

. . . There had always been some corner of the Empire where His Majesty's subjects were causing trouble . . .J. G. Farrell, Troubles (London: Cape, 1990) p. 215.J. G. Farrell has, in common with Paul Scott, an admiration for Joseph Conrad (obvious in their use of symbolism, topographical and otherwise), a fascination with the decline of Empire as a subject for fiction; a reputation that rests on a series of historical novels on this subject. Farrell died at the age of 44 whereas Paul Scott did so at 58; therefore it is not fair to compare their overall achievement. Yet it is necessary to observe that, whereas Scott portrayed one country during a single short period in his major work, Farrell's view was global and spanned virtually a century, lighting upon three important crises in three different countries during three different periods: Troubles (1970), set in the context of the Irish disturbances of 1919-21; The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), located during the 1857 ‘Mutiny’ in India; The Singapore Grip (1978), focusing on the period leading up to the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese during the Second World War, the first signal defeat of the might of the British Empire by an Asian power.

Radical Hope as Protest

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
Stanislava Dikova
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
World War ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Second World

Virginia Woolf’s pacifist commitments prevented her from fully endorsing militant political protest as a productive strategy for emancipation. This orientation is grounded in her belief that violence preserves the ideological structures of oppression and fails to achieve real and positive social change. Instead, her thought and writing explore alternative modes of agency as outlets for more radical emancipatory possibilities. Through a reading of The Years (1937), a historical novel written under the threat of an impending Second World War, this essay traces Woolf’s enquiry into the mechanisms of patriarchal state oppression and the everyday sites, practices, and encounters through which it operates. Using Sara Pargiter as a case study, it probes Woolf’s assertion that women’s status as outsiders is the entry point through which dominant power relations can be challenged and new forms of social freedom negotiated. Building on José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of “queer futurity”, with its attendant notions of critical idealism, utopia and hope, it argues that Woolf’s everyday pacifist-feminist aesthetic is significant for formulating a future-oriented critique of institutional practices of control over bodies and agents who do not conform to normative standards of personhood.

The Neutral Hour

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-132
Author(s):  
Beryl Pong
Keyword(s):  
Short Fiction ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Time Zone ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Time Zones ◽  
The One ◽  
Global War ◽  
Second World

Taking as its context and metaphor the dislocated time zones of the Second World War—where neutral Ireland progressed on a different time zone from Britain—Chapter 4 addresses why neutrality was such a fraught political decision. Independence, for Ireland, was often couched in the rhetoric of youthful potential, but this theme came to suggest political irresponsibility in being ‘off war time’ instead. Examining Henry Green’s ‘fairy tale’ about neutral Ireland, Loving (1945), and Elizabeth Bowen’s non-fiction writings and short fiction, as well as her novel The Heat of the Day (1949), the chapter delves into the contradictory circumstances of neutral Ireland during the Emergency. Two competing understandings of the politics of time—as the temporality of colonial independence, on the one hand, and as the temporality of global war, on the other—created a situation that these writers found difficult to reconcile.

scholarly journals “You will bear witness for us”: Suppressed Memory and Counterhistory in Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s “Hope’s War” (2001)

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Mateusz Świetlicki
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
World War ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World ◽  
Bear Witness

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s historical novels and picturebooks for young readers have gained significant commercial and critical recognition in North America. Interestingly, Ukraine, her grandfather’s homeland, has remained the central theme in her works ever since the publication of the picturebook Silver Threads in 1996. The author of this essay argues that by telling the suppressed, untold stories, hence bringing attention to the next-generation memory of the traumatic experiences of Ukrainian Canadians, Skrypuch puts them on the landscape of Canadian collective and cultural memory and challenges the false generalizations attributed to Ukrainians and Ukrainian Canadians in North America after the Second World War. After briefly outlining the history of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, and explaining the roots of the negative stereotypes attributed to Ukrainians, the author analyzes Hope’s War (2001), Skrypuch’s first Ukrainian-themed novel, and shows that by highlighting the unexpected similarities between the experiences of the protagonist’s grandfather, who during the Second World War was a member of the UPA, and the anxieties of contemporary teenagers, Skrypuch evokes empathy in mainstream and diasporic readers and enables the formation of next-generation memory.

scholarly journals Who Was He? Internment, Exile and Ambiguity in Norbert Gstrein’s Novel Die englischen Jahre (The English Years) (1999)

2021 ◽  
pp. 47-63
Author(s):  
Martin Löschnigg
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Internment Camp ◽  
Isle Of Man ◽  
Political Refugees ◽  
Fictitious Character ◽  
Shifting Identities ◽  
Second World

Winner of the Alfred Döblin Preis in 1999, the novel Die englischen Jahre by the Austrian novelist Norbert Gstrein deals with internment and exile in Britain dur- ing and after the Second World War. It centres on the (fictitious) character of Gabriel Hirschfelder, a writer and refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria who is detained, with oth- er ‘enemy aliens,’ in a camp on the Isle of Man. There, Nazi sympathisers are interned together with Jewish and political refugees, and the central chapters in the novel depict the conditions and resulting conflicts in the internment camp. Hirschfelder dies in exile at Southend-on-Sea, having confessed shortly before his death that he killed a fellow inmate. This confession as well as reports of a transport of internees sunk off the coast of Scotland in 1940 incite a young Austrian woman to try to solve the mystery surrounding Hirschfelder and his allegedly lost autobiography The English Years. The paper discusses how Gstrein combines different genres like the historical novel/historiographic metafic- tion and the whodunit as well as using multiple narrative perspectives and refractions to pinpoint questions of shifting identities and allegiances, and of belonging and alienation in the wake of internment and exile.

scholarly journals “Making Nonsense of the Little Categories”: Slaughterhouse-Five and The Memoirs of a Survivor as autobiographical science fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Georgia Hight
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Living Room ◽  
World War ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

<p>Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) are both novels that blend autobiography with science fiction. In a review of Vonnegut’s Mother Night, Lessing writes that he “makes nonsense of the little categories”. The same applies to Lessing. These two novels live in the porous borders between genre—between fiction and non-fiction.  Vonnegut writes that he can’t remember much of his experiences in the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War. The war novel he writes about them has a protagonist who is “unstuck in time”. I frame my discussion of Slaughterhouse around problems of temporal and narrative ordering. Through use of fractured time, repetitions, and the chronotope, Vonnegut finds a way to express his missing and traumatic memories of the war.  Lessing’s memories are of her early childhood in Persia and Southern Rhodesia. These memories are warped, claustrophobic, and difficult to articulate. Like Slaughterhouse, Memoirs fractures time and space. I organise my discussion of Lessing’s novel around the latter, focusing on a literalised porous border: her dissolving living room wall. Borders and portals between spaces in Memoirs blend the dystopian, science-fiction world of the city with the world of Lessing’s memories; dreams with reality; and the static with the dynamic.  I pose several answers to the question of why science fiction and autobiography. A shared occupation of the two authors was a concern for the madness and dissolution of society, and science fiction engages in a tradition of expressing these concerns. Additionally, Vonnegut and Lessing use the tools of a genre in which it is acceptable for time and space to be warped or fractured. These tools not only allow for the expression of memories that are fragmented, difficult, and half forgotten, but produce worlds that mirror the form of these personal memories.</p>

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