Rebecca West and the Double Agent

This essay will explore the figure of the double agent as it tests notions of citizenship mid-century, specifically the clash or fusion of internationalist/nationalist definitions of citizen loyalty in the construction of the traitor ‘revolutionary’ citizen. It will be look at Kaminsky in Rebecca West's 1966 historical novel The Birds Fall Down as a late rewriting of the double agent, which West had theorized through her analyses of William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’)’s wartime propaganda and Stephen Ward in the Profumo Affair of the early 1960s. West's thinking draws on Hannah Arendt's writings on the double agent in Origins of Totalitarianism. The essay will explore both the political Cold War contexts that motivated West's return to Tsarist Russia and the double agent, and the feminist light cast on treacherous intelligence operations as forms of patriarchal control over women's bodies and minds. West is shown to be revising the double agent trope of spy fiction, reimagining the mole traitor as totalitarian fanatic revealing the extremes of hostile patriarchy and of male political desire.

Rebecca West on communism’s allure for the intellectuals: An appraisal

Feminist activist, novelist, literary critic, bio-ethnographer, legal autodidact, and political writer: Rebecca West (1892–1983) was a 20th-century phenomenon. She was also a lifelong critic of communism’s appeal to the intelligentsia. Communism, West claimed, was attractive to three groups of intellectuals outside the Soviet bloc: a minority of scientists who viewed politics as merely a sum of technical problems to solve; the emotionally devastated for whom communism was a means of mental reorientation; and a déclassé segment of the middle class who envisaged communism as a means of material and status advancement. I examine West’s three explanations for communism’s allure, and then proceed to evaluate her account. My assessment is both empirical, using sociological data on American and European communist parties, and methodological, examining the techniques of West’s style, a mix of novelistic empathy and unmasking political partisanship. This mixture I consider fatal because while the novel, like historical interpretation, allows a generous understanding of human agents, unmasking tends towards caricature and denunciation.

Inventory of another country: Rebecca West and the legacy of 1918

Written in the late 1930s, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941) is shaped on every level by the Great War. West investigates the causes of the conflict in the place from which it originated, calling urgently for a defence of the settlement of Versailles. Her project of persuasion raises general entertainment to the heights of modernist epic and contemporary myth. At the same time, the text’s critique of imperial interference shows the inconsistent global application of the principle of the ‘rights of small nations’. Using the frameworks of psychoanalysis popularized in the anglophone world during the 1920s, West identifies individual struggle with the dilemmas of history, and diagnoses the nature and limits of social change that followed in the wake of 1918.

Cultural heritage in Kosovo through the eyes of Rebecca West

A large part of our public is familiar with the name of the British-Irish author Rebecca West. Domestic journalism abounds with texts about the author due to her extremely positive writing about Serbs and Serbian culture. In the travelogue Black Lamb and the Gray Falcon, West expresses great admiration for our cultural heritage and understanding of our identity, which she identifies with the poem The Fall of the Serbian Empire. During her stay in Macedonia, she was introduced to Bishop Nikolaj, whom she considered one of the most extraordinary people she had ever met. In her travelogue, the author draws a comparison between the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and England in 1939. In this paper, we will try to present her experience of monasteries in Kosovo, pointing to the fact that she considered herself different from other Western authors who, like herself, wrote about the Balkans.

Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West

This article argues that Rebecca West’s sustained scrutiny of imperialism tends to coincide with her theoretical and formalist approaches to fantasy, and from this arises literary innovation significant both to modernist and late modernist contexts. It demonstrates that West’s creative achievement in Harriet Hume (1929), which partially adapts the conventions of other middlebrow and modernist fantasy literature of her day, is usefully read in conjunction with her assessment of interwar geopolitics, and especially her interest in the collective, sociopolitical fantasies that gather around contested national spaces. Furthermore, in Harriet Hume West elaborates a rhetoric of fantasy—stylistically whimsical, and ideologically what might be called a fantasia on national themes—that was elevated to new importance a decade later in her archetypal attack on imperialism, the Balkans travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941).

Rebecca West e a escrita feminina da Primeira Guerra em The Return Of The Soldier

Este artigo tem como objetivos analisar a escrita feminina do trauma de guerra no romance The Return of The Soldier (1918), da autora inglesa Rebecca West, e verificar, mais especificamente, como homens e mulheres foram igualmente afetados pelo trauma da Primeira Guerra. O soldado Chris Baldry retorna do front afetado por uma amnésia traumática que o impede de recordar como era sua vida antes da guerra. De volta ao lar, ele reencontra três mulheres vivendo em sua casa: sua esposa, Kitty, a quem ele não reconhece; a sua ex-amante, Margaret, que ainda o ama; e, por último, sua prima, Jenny. Em termos simbólicos, é possível pensar que a casa onde as três mulheres vivem com Chris representa uma espécie de “laboratório”; um locus de onde elas observam a guerra e formulam seus pontos de vista a respeito desse conflito.

Interwar Imaginings of Collective Cognition

Scholarship on interwar understandings of ‘collective cognition’ – experiences of intellectual union with others – tends to focus on its capacity to threaten individuality. I counter this trend by investigating prose works by H.D., Olive Moore, Rebecca West, and H.G. Wells that champion collective cognition for its capacity to compose communities. I argue that these texts point to an underexplored strand that existed in and alongside modernism in which authors turned to collective cognition to imagine radically egalitarian communities that transcend hierarchies based on history, nationality, and species. After the Second World War, the cultural meanings of collective cognition narrowed, and ‘thinking together’ came to be strongly associated with loss of freedom and loss of self. This article shows that collective cognition emitted a powerfully hopeful potential for a significant cluster of interwar authors, who used it to imagine the peaceful and abundant possibilities of collectivity.