War Novels Research Articles

Moving Beyond the Rhetoric of Provocation: The French and World War II in the Novels of the Hussards (1949–1954)

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, only those who had opposed the Germans or were perceived to have done so could freely express themselves. Soon, however, three young writers clearly leaning to the right of the political spectrum – Antoine Blondin, Roger Nimier, and Jacques Laurent – dared to challenge their narratives in a series of provocative novels published between 1949 and 1954. Quickly referred to as the Hussards after the publication in of a famous essay by Bernard Frank, these writers momentarily occupied the literary space left vacant by their older peers. Without denying the provocative, political and subversive dimensions of the Hussards' war novels, this article will argue that their success was mainly due to the fact that they were largely in line – and not in contradiction – with the ‘horizon of expectations’ of their time ().

Affective Realism

Affective Realism

Eudora Welty’s Challenge to Fascism in The Robber Bridegroom

Eudora Welty’s Challenge to Fascism in The Robber Bridegroom Susan Wood Although recent criticism acknowledges that Eudora Welty should not be read as simply a regionalist who writes about the interior lives of individual characters to the exclusion of wider-reaching sociopolitical issues, we have not fully dismissed this reductive categorization of the author held in consensus by earlier critics. In 1946 William Holder termed her a “distinguished regionalist” (qtd. in McHaney x); Jonathan Yardley in 1970 called Welty a “great regionalist,” but he dampened the positive qualifier by classifying a regionalist as someone “whose view does not extend beyond the first hill” (qtd. in McHaney 167). Diana Trilling calls Welty’s writing “at best, apolitical,” while Richard King claims that Welty’s writing is both “ahistorical and apolitical” (qtd. in Pollack 3, 4). Since many reviewers have not seen political implications in her work, she has had a reputation as being “indifferent to the larger social and political problems of [her] region,” according to Jan Nordby Gretlund (Welty, “An Interview” 226). More recent criticism (since the 1990s, according to Harriet Pollack [2]) has seen Welty as a political writer, contending that her southern setting does not prohibit her from addressing national or international issues. Ten essays in the 2001 collection edited by Pollack and Suzanne Marrs, Eudora Welty and Politics, refine the view of Welty as consciously writing political themes despite her apparent disavowal of the practice in her 1978 essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?” Eudora Welty’s 1942 novel The Robber Bridegroom tacitly responds to the growing threat of fascism, and this can be seen through the construction of the evil stepmother Salome. My purpose here is to show one way in which Welty’s novella is proof that, although the engagement with international events is not as explicit as in the bestselling war novels of the time, Welty deals with issues in her fiction that connect far beyond her region of Mississippi and the American South. In this essay, I will first explain the context during which The Robber Bridegroom was written and published, and then I will expand upon parts of the character Salome in order to support my argument. [End Page 25] Few contemporary reviews of The Robber Bridegroom address the curious fact that the source material for the novella comes primarily from German folk tales; it is a glaring omission not to note that a country at war with the United States was responsible for creating the lore at the backbone of an American story. Reviewer Marianne Hauser holds the strange belief that The Robber Bridegroom “outdoes in its fantastic exuberance any of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm from the folklore of old Germany’s elfin woods” precisely because it is “an American fairy tale” (22). Hauser knows the plot elements are “transplanted” from Germany, but does not discuss the politics of such a revision (22). Nash Burger oddly seems unaware of any German connection to the novella; he states that Welty understands that “the connection of the Southern Anglo-Saxon with his English forebears is universally understood,” and that she writes “in the feeling and style of an Elizabethan or even Middle English folk tale” (28). Burger says that the plot is insignificant, but the connections are “close to the English ballad, close to the Middle English romance,” and include “matter-of-fact acceptance of the supernatural found in the Celtic tales” in order to create something “charming” (29). It seems incredible that this reviewer would so consciously exclude the Grimm connection—and I do believe it was conscious, since the fairy tale had been mentioned in American letters for years and the plot motifs are too easily apparent. Moreover, Burger was a childhood friend of Welty’s, and as such surely could have consulted with her on her source material (Welty, WE xix). Burger’s wording seems like a conscious political choice, focusing on America’s cultural heritage with the British rather than anything touching on Germany. Readers may not see the international interests in Welty’s fiction because of her artistic beliefs about what she called the political “crusader.” Statements by Welty and those who knew her...

The Special Style In Ernest Hemingway’s Narratives

T his article argues that the notion of ‘death’ overwhelms most of Hemingway’s works. ’Death’, as being conceived by Ernest Hemingway in his works is widely driven from the various cultures he has been exposed to as a journalist, a writer and a soldier during the World War One. This article is motivated, by one unique question: Are there any stylistic elements bearing the concept of death To examine this question, the study reveals that Hemingway uses wind, cold, dark, night, rain and black as symbols to show his angst to ‘death’. Hemingway‘s own experience is mirrored in many of his works; A Farwell to Arms is studied because it is the most striking example. The novel is analyzed to depict the inserted stylistic elements referring to ‘death’. For Whom the Bell Tolls bears various types of repetition used to hammer the notion of death. The aforementioned novel is subjected to the study because it best reflects the analysis since it is a novels of war. Key words : Epistrophe, Repetition, Reiteration .

Between Europe and North Africa: Reflections on Spain and Morocco in the War Novels of Carmen de Burgos (1909) and Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1923)

This paper explores the notion of cultural and racial bonds and boundaries between Spain and North Africa in two literary works written during the Spanish colonial campaigns in Northern Morocco in the early twentieth century: Carmen de Burgos’ En la Guerra (1909), and Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s Notas Marruecas de un soldado (1923). My analysis centres on the opposing concepts of degeneration and regeneration. I argue that Carmen de Burgos’ novel establishes hierarchical moral and racial boundaries between Spain and Morocco, and that these boundaries reflect her underlying anxieties concerning cultural differences between Spain and North Africa and the possibility of degeneration through contact with an ‘uncivilized’ environment. Giménez Caballero’s vision of Morocco in Notas Marruecas is also informed by a set of binary oppositions; however, unlike Burgos’ positioning of Spain as culturally superior to Morocco, Giménez Caballero locates Spanish culture somewhere between Europe and North Africa and sees contact with Morocco as a potential source for national regeneration. Ultimately the analysis sheds light on some of the complexities and underlying anxieties of Spanish cultural discourse on North Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Homo prostheticus czyli ciało zdemilitaryzowane. O dylogii powieściowej Jana Żyznowskiego

The author discusses two postwar (I World War) novels by painter and graphic designer Jan Żyznowski. The main character, Seweryn Witan, is a disabled person and Żyznowski's novels are unique in documenting the psychological crisis caused by mutilation. His works express a crisis of the dominant traditional, militaristic idea of masculinity (idolized by Sienkiewicz and Żeromski).

Representation of History in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)

This study deals with the conflict of Nigerian Biafran War 6 July, 1960-15 January, 1967 as represented in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). The study attempts to address the following four questions: first, what are the causes-effects of Biafran/Civil war? Second, why Nigerians have been suffering during the wartime? Third, how does the representation of Nigerian history enable understanding of the post-colonial issues? And final, what is the role of conflict in Nigerian history? In order to understand this conflict, the study addresses the detailed analysis of war conflict, ethnic conflict, class conflict, military conflict and eco-political conflict. The post-colonial approach becomes one of the ways of engaging the theoretical understanding of the novel Half of a Yellow Sun . In sum up, the novel is located with the issues of marginality, history and conflict, which interrogates through post-colonial theoretical formations and the six-phase structure of war novels.

Ghosts in The Archive—Lebanon’s Second-Generation Post-War Novelists and The Limits of Reconstruction

This article explores structural reasons for the “archival turn” performed in the civil war novels of Lebanon's second-generation post-war novelists since the early 2000s. It recognizes the abundant use of precise spatial and temporal references, which contrasts with the practice of Lebanese writers of the 1990s, and explains this change as the result of the authors’ socio-economic position and their position in the literary field. The post-civil war novel thus appears as the memorial practice of a closely circumscribed, largely secular intellectual elite who are excluded from sectarian war narratives as means to make sense of the past.

The Cambridge companion to the literature of the American South

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South. Edited by Sharon Monteith. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 242. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-107-61085-9; cloth, $85.00, ISBN 978-1-107-03678-9.) Sharon Monteith has long been leading figure in American cultural studies, and her interdisciplinary investments have given her work extraordinary range in dealing with and moving beyond the modern South. Thus she would seem an ideal choice as editor of this very contemporary collection of essays. And the collection delivers on this promise; it will be particularly useful in expanding the conception and canon of to include writings from outside the region and, indeed, outside the United States, as well as writings of more evanescent geographic situation that nevertheless engage the in vital ways. Indeed, Monteith's (and her contributors') global perspective may be the most startling element to those unfamiliar with much recent work in the field. The volume's contributors include many fine scholars from the last two generations. Kathryn B. McKee's essay on nineteenth-century southern literature, Judie Newman's on slave and neo-slave narratives, Will Kaufman's on Civil War literature, Scott Romine's on Reconstruction literature, and David A. Davis's on southern modernism offer broad historical overviews that orient the field in both familiar and new ways. Kaufman's discussion of Tap Roots (New York, 1942) provides typical example of the value of this approach, situating James H. Street's novel (and 1948 Hollywood film adaptation) within the long and contested historical legacy of the Lost Cause, and placing the novel's vexed modern reception amid ongoing debates about the range of southern white attitudes toward secession. Confederate nationhood, and white supremacy. (This admirable attention to underappreciated works nearly, but not entirely, exculpates Kaufman for failing to mention even once in his piece William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! [New York, 1936], surely the greatest of all Civil War novels ever written.) Other essays use topical approaches, stretching both the regional parameters of southernness and the methodological tools available in confronting texts. Ernest Suarez and Gary Richards ably address poetry and drama, respectively. Pearl Amelia McHaney offers far-reaching treatment of southern women's writing and its substantial influence beyond the South. Sarah Gleeson-White examines southerners' screen writings and fiction about the film industry, focusing on Walker Percy's Lancelot (New York, 1977) and Horace McCoy's neglected I Should Have Stayed Home (New York, 1938), enabling, as she argues, a set of incongruous practices, writers, and concerns to come into view, compelling us not only to rethink but also to expand the category of Southern literature (p. 146). Likewise, Michael P. Bibler's theoretically sophisticated essay, Queering the Region, suggests some of the ways that writers have used models of sexual and gender queerness to resist, revise, or otherwise engage with the dominant cultural narratives of the South (p. …

Gender-based genre conventions and the critical reception of Buchi Emecheta’s <i>Destination Biafra</i> (Nigeria)

A gendered spatial schema of war – which creates a dichotomy between a masculine battlefront and a feminine home-front – undermines the credibility of women’s participation in battle, impacting on the legitimacy of women’s war novels. Through a study of Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra, first published in 1982, this article highlights the role of genre conventions in the production and reception of war novels written by African women. Emecheta makes a daring choice to reconceptualise the home and/or battlefront dichotomy. By manipulating the representational genre convention of soldier-hero she subverts its archetypal masculinity. Debbie, the female soldier-hero, is the focal point of this analysis. Within the context of post-colonial African literature, women’s writing is portrayed as a process of ‘writing back’ to a canon that represents women as apolitical conduits of tradition. In Debbie, Emecheta foregoes canonical markers of African ‘authenticity’ to create a liminal figure that negotiates her identity between modernity and tradition; masculinity and femininity. The article concludes that the principal reason why the characterisation of Debbie is deemed dissatisfying is that it defies the facile categorisation offered by the adherence to the gendered representational conventions. Too often genre is considered a fixed category yet a meaningful analysis of Destination Biafra forces one to consider it as an open category whose conventions can be ‘bent’ to accommodate minority literatures spawning new sub-genres.

Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry by Joseph Fruscione (review)

Reviewed by: Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry by Joseph Fruscione Christopher Rieger Joseph Fruscione. Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2012. vii + 263 pp. Joseph Fruscione has written the most thorough study to date of the relationship between Faulkner and Hemingway, America's two supreme modernist novelists, and he makes a compelling case in this book that their intense rivalry was a strong influence on both writers and on their works. Scholars of both Faulkner and Hemingway are likely to find new and useful information here and will probably be surprised at how much each author seemed to have his rival in mind throughout their respective careers. Early in his book Fruscione compares Faulkner and Hemingway to both rival bullfighters and jazz musicians, succinctly capturing the competitiveness and the complementary nature and intertextuality of the writers’ relationship,. The strength of the book is Fruscione’s ability to marshal copious amounts of information from a wide variety of sources (letters, fiction, biographies, criticism), present it cogently, and make a strong argument through reading their works, letters, speeches, and public and private remarks as evidence of their psychological influence on one another: “This shared motivation and desire to be America’s definitive modernist, I argue throughout, engendered a mutual psychological influence. Oftentimes, each wanted to outshine his rival; in turn, bringing their mutually referential texts under review will reveal how they were locked in a competition throughout their writing lives, a competition in which—in their minds, and possibly in the academy’s—Faulkner seems to have prevailed” (3). Hemingway, in particular, comes across in letters and conversations as determined to be more manly than other writers, to defeat [End Page 872] them in the public arena, and Fruscione argues that he may have felt feminized by Faulkner’s artistic dominance. Faulkner, on the other hand, comes off as more secure in his masculinity, not as inclined to equate his writing with his manhood: “Although both writers were aware of and somewhat unsettled by this psychocompetitive influence, Hemingway felt an attendant anxiety more acutely than Faulkner did” (8). The first chapter investigates the 1920s as the era in which both writers matured artistically and examines the shared influences that shaped their similar versions of modernism. Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Lewis are not only influential in Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s individual brands of modernism; the competitive literary rivalries and intertextual responses of the “Men of 1914” also create a model of competitive artists pushing each other to respond anew in their work. We see also in this chapter how both men almost comically exaggerated their wartime heroics, creating more valorous and masculine versions of themselves. Although the relationships of the two writers with Sherwood Anderson have been documented in various biographies, Fruscione does a nice job of putting Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s tutelage and subsequent rejection of Anderson in conversation with one another, demonstrating the anxiety-riddled competitiveness that would characterize their own literary feud in the years to come. The connections with Anderson are the dominant focus of this chapter, and perhaps more could have been said about the authors’ time in Paris, the influences of modernist painting, or the effects of World War I on their respective artistic visions. Chapter 2 focuses on the 1930s when the writers’ awareness of one another’s work becomes evident and the responses begin, and Fruscione makes a strong case for Hemingway seeing Faulkner as his principal rival, not just one among many inferiors he could dismiss. The chapter includes an interesting comparison of Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s novels of civil war, The Unvanquished (1938) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), although at times Fruscione’s approach leads to some dubious claims of influence: “Faulkner’s families— Compsons, Sartorises, even Sutpens—bond through storytelling and a collective past, though of course not without tension or conflict. He seems to have guided Hemingway in this direction, since little of Hemingway’s prior work depicted such a strong familial element” (75). These sorts of claims are not frequent, however, and Fruscione has more solid claims for often striking parallels and similarities between the authors...

The image of absence and the politics of naming in Shona war fiction

During Zimbabwe’s liberation war thousands of young people crossed into neighbouring countries to take up arms to fight and end colonialism. There is sufficient evidence that many of these young people were women. Political rhetoric also maintains that women fought alongside their male counterparts. However, in the Shona literature that depicts Zimbabwe’s guerrilla war there is a glaring absence of female characters who play the roles of guerrilla fighters. This article is an attempt to discuss this absence and to explain why there are very few guerrilla girls in Shona war fiction. The article argues that female guerrillas are not given much space in Shona war novels because the writers of these novels continue the oral folktale tradition in which women are rarely made heroines. It is further argued that in the actual guerrilla war of the 1970s female guerrillas were rarely seen fighting at the war front, that the pioneer guerrillas were men and that the masculine discourse about the war excluded women. Moreover, only men have written Shona war novels.

The Dead That Haunt Anil's Ghost: Subaltern Difference and Postcolonial Melancholia

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje's haunting novel about the Sri Lankan civil war, probes paradoxes that arise in postcolonial fictional representations of transnational violence. What is conveyed by novels of war and genocide that cast the whole of a decolonial territory as a “deathworld”? The prism of death in Anil's Ghost requires readers of this text to relinquish settled notions of how we as humans understand our finitude and our entanglements with the deaths of others. Postcolonial fictions of violence conjoin historical circumstance with phantasmatic expressions to raise important questions about mourning, collective agency, and the subalternity of postcolonial societies. Advancing a theory about “postcolonial crypts” in fiction, I argue that postcolonial fictions' attention to violence transforms notions about the value of human life appraised through a dominant human rights framework.

The Political Novel: Re-Imagining the Twentieth Century by Stuart A Scheingold, and: The Novel After Theory by Judith Ryan (review)

SCHEINGOLD, STUART A. Political Novel: Re-Imagining Twentieth Century. New York: Continuum, 2010. vii + 261. $29.95. RYAN, JUDITH. Novel After Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. viii + 260. $29.50. If we fully accept Aristotle's often-cited view that wo/man is a zoon politikon, then we will necessarily despair of ever reading, or writing, a book carrying a title like Political Novel. very subject loses all contour and limit. So, inevitably, engaging and intelligent studies like one offered by Stuart Scheingold proceed on basis of a forgivable conceit, that is reducible to works with certain political themes, rather than all conceivable ones. For Scheingold, major themes of political novel in twentieth are political and political disengagement, especially as they manifest themselves in fiction devoted to, variously, two great world wars, Holocaust and its aftermath, and sundry political in United States and Great Britain from circa 1950 through to 2005. In chapter 1, Scheingold seeks to differentiate hi s own construction of political novel from two important, though not quite current, readings of genre: Irving Howe's Politics and Novel (1957) and, to a lesser extent, Robert Boyers's Atrocity and Amnesia (1987). He rejects Howe's optimistic faith in capacity of writers to evoke plausible models of heroic struggle in what he sees as, borrowing Winston Churchill's saturnine words, the terrible twentieth century (12, 1). Similarly, for Scheingold, Boyers's canon is too inclined to see politically affirmative quests at heart of political novel. He instead foregrounds alienation and cynicism as legitimate standpoints for political novelist (8). Basing his historiography on work of various British social scientists-Giddens, Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew--Scheingold sees twentieth and twenty-first centuries as manifestations of late modernity, a world shaped by nation-state, global capitalism, bureaucratization, industrialism, liberal individualism, and separation of public and private spheres (4). Like Zygmunt Bauman, he assigns modernity responsibility for Holocaust; like Tony Judt, he attributes mad paroxysms of total to this same modernity. In each case, morally vacant bureaucratization and fearsome technological advancement serve as enabling agents of violence and apocalypse on a formerly unimaginable scale. In Kafka's Trial, Joseph K. becomes an early and exemplary victim of modernity's collapse into inscrutable systematization. The individual, writes Scheingold, viewed as agent in modern project, is seen as pawn in [Kafka's] late-modern critique (23). Joseph K.'s powerlessness presages that of millions of others as world goes to war throughout twentieth century. In chapter 2, Scheingold analyzes political in two clusters of novels drawn from inter-war and post-World War Two periods. These works are generally well known, but are obviously relevant here. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry makes his separate peace, bowing out of stupidity and mayhem of Italian Front in World War One. Similarly, as Scheingold summarily demonstrates, characters in other celebrated war novels respond to unspeakable dehumanizations of war through adoption of pacificism as in Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, or madness as seen in Pat Barker's Regeneration and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or possessive individualism in Heller's Catch-22. Each of these novels, and others that are discussed, show how total causes progressive destruction of political agency and with this destruction an inexorable estrangement (51). Chapter 3 takes up themes of Holocaust novel: eradication of Jewish citizenship in Nazi Germany, life and death in concentration camps, and aftermath of Shoah. …

Sacred Belonging: Writing, Religion and Community in H.D.'s Second World War Novels

: This article considers two works from H.D.'s Second World War writing: The Gift and The Sword Went Out to Sea. In these texts, H.D. situates herself in the context of diverse intimate communities: her spiritualist circle, her partnership with Bryher, her family and previous generations of Moravians. These communities ground her personal vision of writing as a spiritual exercise that will bring healing to both the individual psyche and the wider society ravaged by war. The significance of community is such that when she becomes isolated, desolation and breakdown follow. The restoration of communication and community through vision and writing leads to healing and a particular understanding of religious modernism as a unity of spiritual and material, transcendent and ordinary.

Rabbi Akiva and Zev Bacher in the Trenches: Language, Identity, and War in Avigdor Hameiri's The Great Madness

Much of the prose literature of the Great War was written by men who took part in it; it often takes the form of docu-novels. Only one example of this genre exists in Hebrew—Avigdor Hameiri's war novels. His books are unique in offering the Hebrew-reading public in the 1930s an eyewitness report of life at the front. The author's biography and his decision to compose his war narrative in Hebrew highlight the predicament of the Jewish soldiers caught up in the events. Hameiri's novel The Great Madness was the first bestseller published in pre-state Israel and below I explore the reasons for this success.

Young Lions: Jewish American War Fiction of 1948

In 1948 five books about World War II dominated the New York Times best-seller list; all were written by Jews and made Jewish soldiers their central protagonists. This essay focuses on the Jewish war novels of 1948 and their critical reception. Jewish writers argued in their novels that the Holocaust was a central, rather than an ancillary, aspect of the war experience. Other themes that Jewish war novelists took up included a focus on endemic antisemitism and racism in the military and the infusion of intellectualism into the figure of the ideal soldier-hero. Jewish authors wrote about the war in unique ways, and since their novels were best-sellers, they had a direct impact upon how postwar Americans understood the war effort.

Is Postmodern Fiction da Bomb?

Review Article| September 01 2012 Is Postmodern Fiction da Bomb? On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War Novels of Exile and Alternate Worlds, by Grausam, Daniel, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. 196 pages. David H. Evans David H. Evans Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2012) 58 (3): 540–545. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-4009 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation David H. Evans; Is Postmodern Fiction da Bomb?. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2012; 58 (3): 540–545. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-4009 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Die Anglo-Boereoorlog (1899-1902) in die Afrikaanse letterkunde: ’n geheelperspektief

This study reviews Afrikaans literary works (poems, plays, novels and short stories) dealing with the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). War poems written by well- known Afrikaans poets such as Jan F.E. Celliers, Eugène Marais, C. Louis Leipoldt, Totius and D.J. Opperman, as well as some of the few plays that have the war as background, receive attention. See in this regard, for example, N.P. van Wyk Louw’s Die pluimsaad waai ver of bitter begin, which in its day elicited a substantial amount of controversy. In addition to the short stories that deal with the war, many novels on the war have also been published. Attention is drawn to the fact that the upsurge in Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s (and later) went hand-in-hand with the publication of Anglo-Boer War novels. The youth was also not neglected, thanks to best-selling books on the war by Mikro and others. Etienne Leroux’s controversial novel Magersfontein, o Magersfontein! (1976) paved the way for several other noteworthy war novels that demythologise the Afrikaner’s so-called heroic role in the war. The article also identifies the most important topics that have thus far been explored in the Afrikaans literature on the war, for example the role played by Cape rebels; the consequences of the British scorched-earth policy and concomitant camps for white and black civilians; feminism, and the role and experiences of black and coloured people. In conclusion, the mutually enriching relationship between history and literature is investigated.Keywords: Afrikaans literature, Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), Cape rebels, black civilians, faminism, relations history and literatureSubjects: Military history, Literature Studies, South African Studies

The Apothecary (review)

Reviewed by: The Apothecary Elizabeth Bush Meloy, Maile . The Apothecary; by Maile Meloy; illus. by Ian Schoenherr. Putnam, 2011. [368p]. ISBN 978-0-399-25627-1 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-9 Jane Scott, now well into her seventies, recalls her week of life-threatening adventure back in 1952, when she and her parents, television writers accused of Communist sympathies during the Red Scare, moved from California to London to continue their careers. A quotidian trip to the local apothecary for hot water bottles and candy [End Page 159] bars puts Jane on the radar of the apothecary's son, Benjamin Burrows, who is also a classmate in her new school. Benjamin has to date resisted his father's attempts to draw him into the family business, feeling that life as a druggist is a prospect too boring to entertain. But when he discovers that his father is the keeper of the Pharmacopoeia, a book of near-magical instructions and concoctions passed down through generations, his days take on sudden, perilous interest. Russian scientists, aided by a spy ring that includes the teens' teacher, are after the book and its users; Mr. Burrows and his associates are equally determined to use their arcane knowledge to contain the fallout from a hydrogen bomb that's scheduled to be tested in the Russian outpost Nova Zembla. Benjamin and Jane are of course in the thick of spy/ counterspy machinations, and a trip to the test site as stowaways nearly costs them their lives. References to Russian scientist Andrei Sakharov, a number of actual sites, and period television programming add authenticity to the Riordan-esque fantasy/ thriller, and readers who revel in the current output of Cold War novels will enjoy this genre-crossing romp. Jane hints broadly at other adventures (and maybe some romance?) with Benjamin, so watch for Meloy to brew a sequel. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois