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.

Alien Internment in John Galsworthy’s ‘The Bright Side’ and ‘The Dog It was that Died’

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Jill Felicity Durey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Internment Camp ◽  
Bright Side ◽  
Second World ◽  
John Galsworthy

This article illuminates two short stories by John Galsworthy through examining them with the help of his diaries and letters, a handful of unpublished letters by his nephew from an internment camp and secondary historical sources. It argues that the stories, when read in conjunction with these sources, are highly revealing about human nature during Second World War and also about Galsworthy’s prescient fears concerning a second twentieth-century world war, which he did not live to see.

Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty: Selected Correspondence

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Eudora Welty ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Second World

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.

scholarly journals Dokia Humenna’s Depiction of the Second World War and the OUN in Khreshchatyi iar: How Readers Responded

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Myroslav Shkandrij
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Ukrainian Academy ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Emigre Literature ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

<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

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Cairns Craig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
World War ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Second World

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.

scholarly journals Friends in war: Sweden between solidarity and self-help, 1939–1945

2020 ◽  
pp. 001083672090438
Author(s):  
Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou ◽  
Felix Berenskötter
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Winter War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

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.

Hiroshima and the Place of the Narrator

1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Whittier Treat
Keyword(s):  
Medical Profession ◽  
Severe Depression ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Psychological Problems ◽  
Good Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Writer ◽  
Second World

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.

scholarly journals Exploiting Ambiguity: Murder! and the Meanings of Cross-Dressing in Interwar British Cinema

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-312
Author(s):  
Chris O'Rourke
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Crime Film ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Second World

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.

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.

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