‘The Skeleton is Well Wrapped in Flesh’: Official First World War Films and Modernist Literary Corporeality in H.D. and Virginia Woolf

This article examines the intersectionality of modernist literature and the advent of cinema, particularly in the context of the incomparable tragedies of the First World War in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Avant-garde writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot utilized cinema-inspired techniques in some of their most famous literary works, including Ulysses and “The Waste Land.” These techniques are especially salient in light of how much both the First World War and cinema altered societal notions of time, space, and motion.

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Challenging ‘Imperialist’ Cinematography: IRA Attacks on Dublin Cinemas, 1925-1939

Review of Irish Studies in Europe ◽

10.32803/rise.v2i2.1900 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

pp. 119-133

Author(s):

Donal Fallon

Keyword(s):

First World War ◽

Cultural Imperialism ◽

Department Of Justice ◽

World War ◽

War Films ◽

Chief Of Staff ◽

The First World War ◽

Republican Movement ◽

First World ◽

War Film

In mid-November 1925, the Masterpiece cinema in Dublin was called upon by armed men, who seized seven of its eight copies of the First World War film The Battle of Ypres. Shortly afterwards, on 20 November, it was reported that the showing of its remaining copy was enough for the IRA to explode ‘a powerful landmine in the wide entrance to the Masterpiece cinema in Talbot Street’. This marked the beginning of a series of attacks upon Dublin picturehouses. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed sustained denunciation of war cinematography in republican publications such as An Phoblacht and Irish Freedom, as well as occasional violent assaults upon cinemas. This was part of a broader ‘Boycott British’ movement, and an IRA campaign against what it saw as cultural imperialism. Drawing on state intelligence files, such as the Crime and Security papers of the Department of Justice, contemporary newspaper reports from both the mainstream and separatist press, and the archives of leading IRA figures such as Chief of Staff (1926-1936) Moss Twomey, this article demonstrates the manner in which the republican movement attempted to impose censorship on the Dublin cinema industry. It examines the manner in which several war films were selectively censored and amended before they were presented to the Irish public, indicating the fears of the authorities regarding potential political assault.

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VIRGINIA WOOLF'S NOVEL “MRS. DALLOWAY”

Mental Enlightenment Scientific-Methodological Journal ◽

10.51348/tziuj2021210 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 80-90

Keyword(s):

Virginia Woolf ◽

First World War ◽

The Novel ◽

World War ◽

The First World War ◽

The World ◽

The Relationship ◽

First World ◽

The Way

Following work is dedicated to the novel “Mrs.Dalloway”. The main characters are emotionally endowed Dreamer Clarissa Dalloway and humble servant Septimus Warren-Smith, who was a contusion in the first World War described only one day in June, 1923 year. In fact, the novel “Mrs.Dalloway” is the "flow of consciousness" of the protagonists Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren – Smith, their Big Ben clock is divided into certain peace with a bang. Virginia Woolf believes that "life" is manifested in the form of consciousness, death and time, she focuses her essays on such issues as the role of a woman in family and society, the role of a woman in the upbringing of children, the way a woman feels about the world, the relationship between a modern man and a woman.

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The First World War

10.5871/bacad/9780197266267.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Keyword(s):

British Empire ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Fine Art ◽

First World War ◽

World War ◽

Rabindranath Tagore ◽

The First World War ◽

Critical Attention ◽

Literature Culture ◽

First World

Literary and cultural-historical debate about the First World War has focused on whether the conflict inaugurated a new modernity (in Paul Fussell’s terms, a specifically ironic consciousness) or whether it revealed deep continuities, particularly in the area of memorialization. The debate can productively be widened by expanding the scope of critical attention to include, not only English trench poetry, but also the creative production of women, non-combatants, civilians, and writers and artists from Europe and the then British Empire. This enlarged canon, which in this book ranges from the British combatant poets Wilfred Owen and David Jones to the writers and nurses Mary Borden and Enid Bagnold, the civilian novelists H. G. Wells and Virginia Woolf, and the international authors Robert Service, Berta Lask, Claire Studer Goll, Ricarda Huch, Gertrud Kolmar, Anna Akhmatova and Rabindranath Tagore, enables us to rethink the very meanings of terms such as ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’. Literature itself is illuminated through juxtaposition with film, photography and fine art. Three areas in particular reveal the ways in which literature, culture and the war coalesce in a putative modernity: the unfathomable, intensity and ‘cosmopolitanism’. These emerge via investigation of issues such as shellshock, sacrifice, death, aerial bombing, resistance, empire and race.

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Accessorizing Clarissa: How Virginia Woolf changes the clothes and the character of her lady of fashion

Modernist Cultures ◽

10.3366/e2041102209000446 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 4 (1-2) ◽

pp. 24-47 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Mark Gaipa

Keyword(s):

Virginia Woolf ◽

Lower Class ◽

First World War ◽

World War ◽

Women's Clothing ◽

The First World War ◽

Class Privilege ◽

The Masses ◽

Working World ◽

First World

The period following the first world war in England saw dramatic changes in women's clothing: the manufacturing of quality ready-made clothing brought fashion to the masses, and modern fashions helped liberate women with simpler, lighter, and more youthful designs. These changes, I argue, have great consequence for Virginia Woolf's lady of fashion, Clarissa Dalloway. In her story “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” (1922), Woolf produces an ultimately satirical portrait of Clarissa, who remains insulated, by class privilege and fashion sensibility, from the working world about her; but when Woolf rewrites her story as a novel (1925), Clarissa comes to feel deeply for her lower-class counterparts. The change reflects Woolf's modernist technique, which strips away Clarissa's material insulation. But Woolf's dematerialized modernism in turn echoes contemporary women's fashions, which likewise were revolting against heavy materials, exploring youthful looseness, and even allowing ladies and workers to become fashion doubles.

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Dressing Wounds: Considerations on Trauma Theory and Life Writing in Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth

Journal of English Language and Literature ◽

10.17722/jell.v3i2.55 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 259-262

Author(s):

Denise Borille

Keyword(s):

Virginia Woolf ◽

Young Women ◽

Life Writing ◽

First World War ◽

Trauma Theory ◽

World War ◽

The First World War ◽

Vera Brittain ◽

The Impact ◽

First World

This paper aims at analyzing how the trauma inflicted by the First World War is described by Vera Brittain in her autobiographical novel Testament of Youth (1933). The author, who shares many features in common with Virginia Woolf – regarding witnessing and writing about trauma – also lost her loved ones to the War: her fiancé, Roland Leighton, her brother, Edward Brittain, and her friend, Victor Richardson.For Vera Brittain and some of her contemporaries, nursing became a woman‟s experience of taking part in the male-dominated realm of the First War. From treating wounds to listening to injured soldiers‟ talks, First War nurses grasped the geographies of men‟s bodies and minds, something regarded as “improper” by most parents whose daughters were born between the late Victorian and early Edwardian ages. Nursing was the closest a woman could get to the battleground in those days; in Brittain‟s case, for instance, the only safe way to see Roland again. V.A.D. nursing also allowed many women to evolve from tactile experience to the subjective activity of writing about the War, and Brittain‟s Testament of Youth may be regarded as one of its best examples.What may account for the title Testament of Youth is the thought Brittain kept that writing about the distress she and her contemporaries felt due to war would probably have an impact on coming generations. She leaves a “testament” of a terrible incident that would more likely recede; yet, she acknowledges that, whatever may happen, it would never surpass the impact that the First War had on her generation of young women, who were deprived of the innocence of their youth.

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