Rose Macaulay and Propaganda

The novelist Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) had direct professional experience of Britain's secret propaganda operation during the First World War. She was among the first British novelists to take propaganda seriously as a subject for fiction, and wrote insightfully about its methods and its social implications. Moreover, her long career illuminates both the continuity and the development of the British state's clandestine efforts to shape public opinion at home and abroad, from the beginnings of systematic, state-directed propaganda in the First World War to the more diffuse strategies of early Cold War anti-communism. Despite her close connections to propaganda in both world wars, however – and notwithstanding the interest her fiction very frequently takes in the worlds of official information, disinformation, and espionage – Macaulay has hardly figured in recent scholarship on the links between literature and national information systems. This article argues that Macaulay approached the challenge of reconciling propaganda and literature differently from many of her modernist contemporaries, refusing to abandon the idea of fiction as a persuasive and socially-engaged form of imaginative writing. If this position made her an outlier in the climate of reaction against propaganda which followed the First World War, it would, by the early years of the Cold War, seem much more tenable. In its first half, the article establishes Macaulay's bona fides as a participant in Britain's wartime propaganda establishment, and describes the impression this experience left on her early fiction. It then turns to Macaulay's final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, in which religious propaganda and anti-communist rhetoric combine, to great comic effect, in the febrile atmosphere of the Cold War middle east.

Literature of the 'Thirties

The literature of the 1930s occupies an important and complex position in critical accounts of modern British and Irish writing. Unlike terms such as modernism and postmodernism, writing of the 1930s does not announce itself as an “ism,” seeming at first glance to operate as a neutral label for writing that happens to have been published in the period 1930–1939. Like modernism and postmodernism, however—indeed in some ways even more so—the term is, in practice, associated with a specific set of thematic concerns, aesthetic approaches, and political commitments. The unique literary mythology of the “Red Decade” was being deliberately and self-consciously encoded by key protagonists before the decade was out, with W. H. Auden influentially regretting the “clever hopes” of a “low, dishonest decade” in his poem “September 1, 1939.” Auden’s own accounts of his dalliance with left-wing, committed writing and his subsequent disillusionment—mirrored by the trajectories of Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and others—helped to consolidate a narrative of the decade’s literature as one that began with the articulation of overweening “clever hopes,” and ended as these were exposed as dangerous, adolescent illusions. The thirties, for some time, operated as a convenient box for the idea of committed literature. The decade confronted students of modern literature like a carefully curated museum display designed to illustrate the folly of mixing political commitment with literature. Yet this familiar narrative of the decade’s writing is modeled around the particular experiences of a few, largely male, upper-middle-class poets. Since the 1980s, the general tendency of scholarship has been to complicate or unpick this narrative, expanding the canon beyond the Auden circle, emphasizing continuities with the modernism of the 1920s, and producing more nuanced accounts of committed literature that are not bound up with its inevitable failure. These shifts have gone along with a rising tide of scholarly interest in previously neglected women writers, including Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among many others. In our own troubled political times, literature of the ‘thirties continues to provoke and fascinate because of the important questions it poses about writing and commitment, even while the forms of commitment and the range of writers studied under this heading have proliferated. Through this process an excessively tidy literary-historical narrative has increasingly been replaced by something messier, more open ended, and ultimately more interesting.

The Art of Rambling: Journeys through Space and Time with Mary Kingsley, Rose Macaulay, Ursula Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison and Octavia Butler

In “The Art of Rambling: Journeys Through Space and Time”, Sarah LeFanu will look at the travels and travel-writings of, predominantly, Mary Kingsley and Rose Macaulay, and will boldly suggest some connections with the science fictional spacewomen and time-travellers of the second wave of feminism. She will talk about five travelling women whose lives span over one hundred years, and look at some of the connections between them in their lives and in their writing. By focusing on the experience of the five authors in a larger socio-cultural and literary context, LeFanu will trace the implications of writing and travelling vis-à-vis the intersectionality of one’s personal commitments and motivations, with the aim to discovering how these are inflected by questions of gender and gender bias, consequently bearing upon the shape of modern discourses of women travel and travel writing. While each of the women travelled in different modes and to different places, for every one of them the imaginative worlds of their childhoods inspired them to engage with the world outside, an engagement that was not just personal but was also profoundly political.

Ruins of the smart city: a visual intervention

The visual imaginary of the future city is increasingly dichotomized between visions of hyper-technological digital urbanism and the city in a state of ruin, without people, overtaken by nature. These alternating imaginaries key into concerns over urban futures, as questions of sustainability and rising inequality come to bear on urban life. Such binary imaginaries produce volumes of visual material, lauding and critiquing philosophies of newness, endless progress and the city without decline. This article uses an inventive visual methodology to ask how these imaginaries become situated in the everyday ecologies of living. This methodology focuses on several so-called ‘brownfield’ sites in Salford, UK, and the ‘smart’ Oxford Road Corridor in neighbouring Manchester, to playfully and visually map the entanglement of digital urban ecologies through the themes of wilderness, play and compost. These three themes relate to the pleasure of urban wilderness described by Rose Macaulay, reflecting on London’s wild ruins after the Second World War; the playful contrast between smart urbanism and urban wastelands, understood through interdisciplinary visual methods; and Haraway’s notion of compost as the fertile ground of collaboration that marks a material–semiotic entanglement between place, people and nature. The authors investigate how these frameworks reflect the diversity of urban ecology (animals, plants and humans) and might provide an alternative vision of how the city could be, a vision built from how the city currently is.

The Literary Cartography of Ruins

After air raids destroyed much of London’s landscape, there were attempts at not only material but imaginative reconstruction. Books of photographs comparing London’s landmarks before and after ruination were made; maps of ‘ruin-walks’ were created for tourists to follow; and new editions of past histories of London were reissued without incorporating present-day damage, as if to elide and erase the wartime years. The intersection between memory and ruins is of primordial concern in a post-war Bildungsroman by Rose Macaulay, whose young protagonist remains unable to assimilate into her post-war landscape. Through the chronotope of ruin, Chapter 9 explores how Macaulay combines London’s landscape with that of her character’s traumatized childhood in Vichy France. In doing so, she explores the limits of the Bildungsroman, in its emphasis on individual-social formation, as a genre for the post-war world.

"Militarism is a Movement of Retrogression": the Feminist Pacifism of Jane Addams, Mabel St Clair Stobart and Rose Macaulay in World War I.

The telling of the Great War (1914-1918), mainly through the point of view of combatants, is one of the best scenarios exemplifying how women have been obviated and censored throughout history. Moreover, the engagement of pacifist women in the conflict has been doubly belittled due to a misinterpretation of the term ‘pacifism’. Consequently, this paper aims at re-examining the origins and values of pacifism from a western perspective and giving visibility to pacifists Jane Addams, Mabel St Clair Stobart and Rose Macaulay and their efforts during the event.

Fiction during the Second World War

This chapter focuses on home front literature and concentrates particularly on literature portraying the wartime experience in London. The majority of war literature was produced by authors who had remained in London. These tended to be non-combatants, but played an often major role in the ARP (Air Raid Protection) services, defending their city. Henry Green, William Sansom, and Stephen Spender worked as firemen; Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene as ARP wardens; and Rose Macaulay as an ambulance driver. This was a community of writers who were facing danger and defending their city, rather like the soldier poets in the trenches in the First World War. These authors had direct experience of the various periods of bombing, as well as of the peculiar hiatus when the war carried on elsewhere.