The Spectre Of Defeat In Post War British And Us Literature

It is a commonplace belief that history is written by the victorious. However, less recognised but equally common is the idea that the defeated also write history, even if their particular account is rather different. This collection looks at these matters from a novel and distinct perspective. It essentially presents the idea that victors often perceive themselves as defeated, by examining the ways in which the idea of defeat comes to dominate the victors’ own sense of superiority and achievement, thereby undermining the certainties that victory is conventionally thought to create. The contributions here discuss fiction (mostly UK and US) published since the First World War. Through the frameworks of experience, memory and post-memory, they examine this subliminal defeat, basically as seen in conflict itself, in the societies that it affects, and in the individual lives of those who it destroys. The result is an innovative literary account of the victorious-yet-somehow-defeated.

In the Preface to his ground-breaking The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell claimed that “the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical, and artistic determinants on subsequent life.” Forty years after the publication of Fussell’s study, the contributors to this volume reconsider whether the myth generated by World War I is still “part of the fiber of [people’s] lives” in English-speaking countries. What is the place of the First World War in cultural memory today? How have the literary means for remembering the war changed since the war? Can anything new be learned from the effort to re-imagine the First World War after other bloody conflicts of the 20th century? A variety of answers to these questions are provided in Re-Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture, which explores the Great War in British, Irish, Canadian, Australian, and (post)colonial contexts. The contributors to this collection write about the war from a literary perspective, reinterpreting poetry, fiction, letters, and essays created during or shortly after the war, exploring contemporary discourses of commemoration, and presenting in-depth studies of complex conceptual issues, such as gender and citizenship. Re-Imagining the First World War also includes historical, philosophical and sociological investigations of the first industrialised conflict of the 20th century, which focus on responses to the Great War in political discourse, life writing, music, and film: from the experience of missionaries isolated during the war in the Arctic and Asia, through colonial encounters, exploring the role of Irish, Chinese and Canadian First Nations soldiers during the war, to the representation of war in the world-famous series Downton Abbey and the 2013 album released by contemporary Scottish rock singer Fish. The variety of themes covered by the essays here not only confirms the significance of the First World War in memory today, but also illustrates the necessity of developing new approaches to the first global conflict, and of commemorating “new” victims and agents of war. If modes of remembrance have changed with the postmodern ethical shift in historiography and cultural studies, which encourages the exploration of “other” subjectivities in war, so-far concealed affinities and reverberations are still being discovered, on the macro- and micro-historical levels, the Western and other fronts, the battlefield, and the home front. Although it has been a hundred years since the outbreak of hostilities, there is a need for increased sensitivity to the tension between commemoration and contestation, and to re-member, re-conceptualise and re-imagine the Great War.

The First World War has given rise to a multifaceted cultural production like no other historical event. This handbook surveys British literature and film about the war from 1914 until today. The continuing interest in World War I highlights the interdependence of war experience, the imaginative re-creation of that experience in writing, and individual as well as collective memory. In the first part of the handbook, the major genres of war writing and film are addressed, including of course poetry and the novel, but also the short story; furthermore, it is shown how our conception of the Great War is broadened when looked at from the perspective of gender studies and post-colonial criticism. The chapters in the second part present close readings of important contributions to the literary and filmic representation of World War I in Great Britain. All in all, the contributions demonstrate how the opposing forces of focusing and canon-formation on the one hand, and broadening and revision of the canon on the other, have characterised British literature and culture of the First World War.

The first reference book to deal so fully and incisively with the cultural representations of war in 20th-century English and US literature and film. The volume covers the two World Wars as well as specific conflicts that generated literary and imaginativ

This Companion covers British and American war writing from Beowulf to Don DeLillo.

The first reference to literary and cultural representations of war in 20th-century English & US literature and film. Coving the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the War on Terror, this Companion reveals the influence of modern wars on the imagination. These newly researched and innovative essays connect 'high' literary studies to the engagement of film and theatre with warfare, extensively cover the literary and cultural evaluation of the technologies of war and open the literary field to genre fiction. Divided into 5 sections:. 20th-Century Wars and Their Literatures Bodies, Behaviours, Cultures The Cultural Impact of the Technologies of Modern War The Spaces of Modern War Genres of War Culture Key Features. All-new original essays commissioned from major critics and cultural historians Reflects the way war studies are currently being taught and researched: in the volume's approach, structure and breadth of coverage For scholars: core arguments and detailed research topics For students: Historically grounded topic- and genre-based essays, useful forstudying the modern period and war modules

This book explores how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. Each chapter presents fresh insights into the literature of a particular conflict. The range of literature examined complements the rich array of topics related to wartime sacrifice that the contributors discuss.

Realism is often held to be aesthetically outmoded and philosophically untenable. This new study challenges that view. It explores the fiction of a variety of postwar novelists, identifying a wide range of distinctive responses to the modernist legacy.