Literature Of World War Research Articles

A Gap in the Literature: The Evolution of Britain’s Second World War Yugoslav Policies

ABSTRACT The decision processes behind the formation of Britain’s wartime policies represented the intersection of multiple, sometimes competing variables, from political to military and from immediate to long-term. There remain unanswered questions that arise from these competitions and contradictions within the British government’s, oftentimes multi-track policies, which hold far-reaching implications for understanding events. Britain’s policies of support for resistance movements in occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War serve as a striking example. The historical understanding of how British policy developed concerning Yugoslavia, its motivations, objectives, and how these were defined and prioritized by the individuals and agencies involved with these processes, represents a small but deeply contentious corner of Second World War literature, wherein much remains unresolved. This article, based on doctoral research carried out at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London, analyses the forces that shaped British policy concerning Yugoslavia in the light of what Graham Allison has called ‘the essence of decision.’ That is, by looking to the British government as a policy arena and examining the ‘official mind(s)’ of the policy community in that context, highlighting the multiple overlapping forces, both internal and external, that interacted in shaping the evolution of British policy. By resurveying various British archives, it has been possible to resolve many longstanding historiographical disputes, as well as present new alternative approaches to viewing British policy development concerning Yugoslavia. Those findings, presented here, suggest a view of Britain’s Yugoslav policy that was far more reactive and constrained than previously presented. The reality of the British government, its policy development, and its chosen course is far more chaotic and disjointed than the ‘all behind you, Winston’ myth, and when viewed with this appreciation present British policy development as less sensation, but far more remarkable.

The problem of war and peace in European literature of the 20th century

Aim. The aim of the article is to identify and arrange the patterns of influence of the consequences of the wars of the 20th century on literature as one of the characteristic manifestations of the socio-cultural activity of the community involved in destructive military actions, and the influence of these literary works on modernity. Methods. The research employed the following methods: collection and analysis of works of war literature, cross-sectional expert rating analysis, content analysis and drawing analytical conclusions. Results. The study was focused on two lists of literary works about the First and Second World Wars. According to the rankings, Erich Maria Remarque - Der Weg zurück (about the First World War) and Anne Frank - Het Achterhuis (about the Second World War) are the leaders. Stylistic dynamics showed a change from generalized moral reflections to personal experiences of military horrors. The results confirmed the impact of military conflicts on literature and its interaction with other socio-cultural phenomena. Conclusions. The authors’ appeal in the war literature of World War II to the personal experiences of the potential reader through the mediation of autobiographical literary works contributes to a fundamental revision of the moral and ethical norms of the post-war society. The academic novelty is a comprehensive analysis of the impact of global military conflicts on European literature and their role in the modern world. The results of the study can be used in literary studies, education and cultural studies for a better understanding of the influence of military conflicts on literature and the formation of a humanistic worldview. The prospects for further research direction focus on increasing the sample of empirical data through content analysis of a larger number of master works of war literature.

The Literature of Absolute War: Transnationalism and World War II

The Literature of Absolute War: Transnationalism and World War II

Cognitive Grammar and Readers’ Perceived Sense of Closeness: A Study of Responses to Mary Borden’s ‘Belgium’

This article analyses the degree to which readers report a perceived sense of closeness to the events depicted in ‘Belgium’, the opening story of Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone. Theoretically, I draw on Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, which models language primarily through its notion of construal, an aspect of which claims that - ing forms impose an internal perspective on a scene that results in the interpretative effect of it being ‘close by’. This study tests this idea empirically by utilising a quantitative tool (Likert scale) to elicit two sets of verbal data, which are then analysed qualitatively. My analysis demonstrates that readers respond to the events in the story and articulate the relationship of particular language features to their responses in different – and often surprising – ways. The study is the first in stylistics to empirically test the interpretative effects of verb forms as theorised by Cognitive Grammar and thus contributes new knowledge both by exploring how the landscapes of First World War literature are experienced by readers and analysing how the language of those landscapes may give rise to particular reported effects.

Poetic Thinking Today: An Essay

Poetic Thinking Today: An Essay

Over there: rethinking American First World War literature and culture – Introduction

ABSTRACT This Special Issue of First World War Studies considers the specifically American literary and cultural production of the First World War and what distinguishes it from other national war literatures and cultures. Together the articles seek to assess how we should characterize, theorize and categorize American First World War cultural production. Despite the many memorials and memory sites to American participation, and the impact of the recent centenary, public memory of the conflict in the US remains minimal, overshadowed by the Civil War on one side and the Second World War and the Vietnam War on the other. The Eurocentric focus of the key works of First World War cultural criticism – by Paul Fussell, Samuel Hynes, Modris Eksteins and Jay Winter – is perhaps due to what Hazel Hutchison notes as the strange place of the war in American cultural memory, as a war which ‘has never quite captured the public imagination’ (The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War, 2015). Instead it is usually focused through the ‘lost generation’ writers of the 1920s: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al. Bringing together a range of scholars and drawing predominantly on literature and film by male and female non-combatants as well as participants, the case studies here consider American First World War novels, poetry, political papers, film, and screenplays. Interdisciplinary readings allow the contributors to find generic tropes and connections across different media. In this way we seek to contribute to an ongoing conversation about American First World War cultural production, and a critical field that is very much still in the process of formation and consolidation.

„Kämpfet recht!“1 Themen einer evangelischen „Soldatenethik“ im Deutschen Reich während des Ersten Weltkriegs

The paper analyses how in German Protestant sermons and devotional literature of World War I an “ethic for soldiers” was drafted. In their writings, the pastors offered the soldiers advice on “righteous fighting” and emphasized the compatibility of Christianity and soldiery. Drawing on the theological tradition, they distinguished between private and public ethics. AsaChristian in private, life a soldierwas fully committed to the gospel and, thus, to loving his neighbour. At the same time, however, due to his profession and as a citizen of the German Reich, he was subject to the German government and obliged to obey this government by killing if necessary. Examining letters offers a further perspective: the complex distinction between private and public ethics was hardly distinguished by soldiers themselves. The letters show also that for some soldiers the idea of following Jesus in their actions did have a meaningful effect during wartime. By comparing the two positions (pastors – soldiers), one can draw the picture ofa multi-layered “ethic for soldiers” during World War I.

A memória na Literatura da Segunda Guerra Mundial: narrações como testemunho histórico e invenção

Este artigo reflete sobre a influência da memória na Literatura da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Focando principalmente na lembrança traumática de soldados alemães que se tornaram posteriormente escritores, o artigo coteja as possibilidades da narração, que compreendem ao mesmo tempo uma parte de relato histórico, ficção e de reorganização, ora intencional, ora não, de suas recordações mais marcantes. O relembrar destes atores, que não pretendem alcançar uma verdade histórica, percorre caminhos imaginados para liberta-se catarticamente do passado traumático. Busca-se aqui também apresentar exemplos de casos em que o testemunho, como realidade pessoal (e não histórica) inconsciente perpassa a narração de forma a construir uma realidade fiel ao autor e a muitos de seus leitores.

Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts by George M. Johnson

Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts by George M. Johnson

Misfits of War: First World War Nurses in the Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

AbstractThe article is an analysis of the representation of Australian nurses in Thomas Keneally 2012 First World War novel, The Daughters of Mars. Inspired by rigorous research, Keneally fictionalizes the lives of two nursing sisters in the Middle East, on a hospital ship in the Dardanelles, as well as in hospitals and casualty clearing stations on the Western Front. His novel thus reclaims an important facet of the medical history of the First World War. The author of the article situates her analysis in the context of historical research on the First World War and the Australian Anzac myth, illuminating the specifically Australian elements in Keneally’s portrait of the Durance sisters. She demonstrates that The Daughters of Mars celebrates the achievements of “Anzac girls”, negotiating a place for them in the culture of commemoration. Yet, at the same time, Keneally attempts to include his female protagonists in the “manly” world of Anzac values, privileging heroism over victimization. Consequently, they become “misfits of war”, eagerly accepting imperial and nationalist ideologies. Thus, in a way characteristic of Australian First World War literature, The Daughters of Mars fuses the tropes of affirmation and desolation.

Children's Literature and Culture of the First World War. Eds Lissa Paul, Rosemary Ross Johnston and Emma Short

Children's Literature and Culture of the First World War. Eds Lissa Paul, Rosemary Ross Johnston and Emma Short

The 1939 State

Steve Ellis’s British Writers and the Approach of World War II diverges from previous studies of Second World War literature by concentrating solely on the period between Chamberlain’s “appeasement” in Munich and the fall of the Chamberlain government in May 1940—a period of uncertainty, Ellis argues, extended to an anxiety over possible political structures that might follow after the war had ended. Concentrating on established writers including T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, Ellis’s study maps the rich, discursive contexts surrounding debates over war policy, different forms of possible government and peace aims in 1939 Britain. Although Ellis’s study could have benefited from occasional closer formal engagement, his research adds important detail and nuance to narratives of the development of public attitudes to the approaching war.

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque by Libby Murphy

Reviewed by: The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque by Libby Murphy Cecilia Benaglia (bio) Libby Murphy. The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 304 pages. Many accounts of life in the trenches during World War I written by French combatants share a certain air de famille, which is due not only to the similar conditions and objective situations they narrate, but also to the type of humanity these texts describe. Libby Murphy' The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque proposes to read the common traits shared by numerous World War I fictional books, and in general by cultural artifacts from this period, through the notion of the picaresque. In her book, Murphy approaches the picaresque not as a historically bound genre in which modern writers would inscribe their work, but rather as an "ethos," or as a "way of life" that she describes in the following terms: "(one) based on self-preservation through resourceful improvisation, making do, and accepting conditions as they are, rather than trying to change them" (2). If this mood was so common in the literature and the culture of the Great War, it is because it offered writers, journalists and common civilians an alternative narrative path to the traditional language of heroism. In Murphy's own terms, the picaresque provides them "an alternative imaginative framework to tragedy and victimization—a framework for surviving conditions as they are" (3). In all the novels that represent this "way of life," we encounter modern incarnations of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish picaro; despite inevitable variations, these figures maintain something in common: an acceptance of the world as it is, a pragmatic attitude aiming at surviving amidst disastrous situations and an immunity in the face of violence and abuse. The book is divided into eight chapters; each of them deals with a specific aspect of the war picaresque. Along with detailed analysis of novels belonging to the "canon" of First World War literature, from Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline to Les Croix de bois by Roland Dorgelès, Murphy proposes fascinating readings based on a large variety of historical and cultural documents. In the chapter entitled "Tactics of the Foot Soldier. The Arts and Antics of Système D," the author analyses la débrouille, namely the capability of "getting out of trouble, making do, cultivating the art of expedients, living by one's wits" (44-45). By shifting attention from the moment of extreme combat violence to episodes of rest and of everyday life of the soldiers, Murphy adopts Michel de Certeau's notion of tactic to read the Système D, a mindset [End Page 1118] and a slogan that became popular and widespread in France to the point of being "elevated to the status of national mantra" (11). Murphy's goal is to use the notion of the picaresque to reread in an original and coherent perspective a large body of diversified cultural productions. Even more interestingly, she also approaches the picaresque as a notion that can contribute to a major historiographical debate around people's participation in the Great War. Indeed, historians are still grappling with a challenging question: how and why did millions of people agree to fight for such a long period of time and in such terrible conditions? A first position, known as the paradigm of consent and shared by historians working at the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, supports the vision according to which French soldiers had a deep commitment to the war and felt a strong identification with the Republic. A second vision, common among historians of the Collectif de Recherche International et de Débat sur la guerre de 1914–1918, argues that soldiers kept fighting because they were victims of coercion. According to Murphy, the picaresque mediates between these two positions making it possible to keep together aspects that seem in contradiction with each other, and thus to embrace the complexity of the situations French society was going through. Neither powerless victims nor martyrs, soldiers imagined and represented themselves as picaresque survivors whose...

“The Cataclysm We All Remember”: Haunting and Spectral Trauma in the First World War Supernatural Stories of H. D. Everett

ABSTRACTWhile there has been increased interest in women's writing from the First World War, there has been less critical attention devoted to the development of the First World War short story, especially supernatural short fiction from the war. This article combines each of these avenues for studying First World War literature—the female perspective, the short-story form and the supernatural—by examining the First World War supernatural fiction of Henrietta Dorothy Everett. “Over the Wires” (1920), “The Whispering Wall” (1916) and “A Perplexing Case” (1920) each highlight the supernatural as a means of coping with wartime trauma and grief. In stories that center on war crimes, ancestral ghosts and shell shock, Everett gives readers a unique female perspective on the aftermath of war, as these stories concern how those on both the home front and the battlefield experience mysterious supernatural events that reflect the often inexplicable and unpredictable nature of war.

Canada's Cultural Mobilization during the First World War and a Case for Canadian War Culture

This article examines Talbot Mercer Papineau's letter to Henri Bourassa and Papineau's impact on Canadian cultural mobilization and its war culture. European historians of the First World War have used the concept of cultural mobilization to understand the lines that connected battlefront and home front and their impact. As evidenced by the recent historiographical review of First World War literature in the pages of the Canadian Historical Review, Canadian scholars ought to adopt a similar framework to unite two literatures that separately focus on the military history and social history of the war. Papineau's 1916 letter provides a glimpse into how a soldier expressed his perspective of the war from the frontlines and participated in the mobilization of Canada's war culture. His writing was a result of his war experience, but Papineau wrote it for a Canadian audience at home, and its wide publication exposed his views to millions across Canada and Britain. Papineau urged Canadian citizens (specifically French Canadians) to support the purpose and value of the war as understood by Canadian soldiers. This article offers Papineau as a case study to encourage a new direction for the Canadian history of the First World War and further work on cultural mobilization and war culture.

Middle-Class Fathers, Sons and Military Service in England, 1914–1918

The figure of the hyper-patriotic middle-class father, happy to sacrifice his sons to the war, while remaining snug at home, was a recurrent feature of post-First World War literature. This article places this view of wartime fatherhood under scrutiny, suggesting that middle-class fathers with sons of military age rarely behaved as straightforward enforcers of the state’s call to arms. Alongside expressions of vocal pride in sons who conformed to the manly ideal by volunteering, there were resistance, silence and fear, while support for sons who sought to avoid enlistment was a good deal more evident than any determination that sons should do their ‘bit’ at all costs.

The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War by Hazel Hutchison (review)

Reviewed by: The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War by Hazel Hutchison Alice Kelly The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War. Hazel Hutchison. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 26 + 242. $45.00 (cloth). Opening with a reading of a wartime poem by the non-canonical writer Mary Borden, the first pages of Hazel Hutchison’s The War That Used Up Words establish an ambition to destabilize our conceptions and categories of American First World War literature. Hutchison notes the strange place of the war in American cultural memory as a war which “has never quite captured the public imagination” and is usually focused through the “lost generation” writers of the 1920s: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al. (14, 2). Hutchison instead chooses to study “a group of American authors who observed the war in Europe between 1914 and 1918, and who wrote about what they saw,” namely Mary Borden, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte, Grace Fallow Norton, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos (2). She makes the case for the distinctive nature of American First World War literature, suggesting that America’s initially neutral status and lack of censorship (until 1917) “allowed its authors and journalists an experimental and polemical freedom that was not available to British writers,” which “quickened their sense of the war as a cultural rather than a sociopolitical event” (3). In contrast to their European counterparts, “American readers had almost three years to think and read about the war before it became their national business” (119). Attempting to theorize and recategorize a diverse body of work (or at least to open up established categories), the success of Hutchison’s argument is in its amalgamation of biographical and historical information with close readings, its lively intellectual and imaginative engagement with the period, and its emphasis on lesser-known, but highly important, texts. Offering an overview of the profound changes that America’s involvement wrought on domestic social, political, economic, and military life, Hutchison argues that, most importantly, it gave the nation “a new sense of itself as … a powerful arbitrating presence on the international stage” (13). She suggests the belated nature of inquiries that look to 1920s writings for “the origins of traits which emerged so distinctly from the conflict: detachment, disillusionment, disparate perspectives, montage, irony, the renegotiation of gender, the disruption of time, the inadequacy of language” (3). She argues instead that “the really creative moment, the ignition spark of innovation, happened during the war,” whilst acknowledging the “many lines of continuity that run through the narrative of change” and citing writers such as Wharton, who “maintained her measured prose” after the war (3, 19). The War That Used Up Words therefore “aims to map that shift of balance from the old to the new,” which goes “in search of early glimpses of disillusionment, irony, and fragmentation” but “also seeks to understand the sense of social and political responsibility” that led writers to participate, and explores how their writings were received in the wartime publishing context (19). Put more simply, it is “about how the war first imprinted itself onto the patterns of American writing” (17). Positioning her scholarship amongst the recent broadening of the field of war studies to encompass previously marginalized aspects and experiences of the war (the colonial, gendered, medical, etc.), Hutchison suggests that “the group of writers at the heart of this study emerged distinctly from their surroundings, for reasons which … have over time become positively disruptive” (19-20). Her selection of authors, “all self-conscious literary artists, who had published in other areas before observing the war,” might seem strange, she tells us, “because it cuts across a number of the familiar categories and binary opposites within which writing of the war is more usually understood: modernist, conservative, pacifist, interventionist, male, female, young, old, canonical, obscure” (21). The sole connecting factor between her authors is their shared sense [End Page 266] that “artistic response had to be matched by action,” meaning that each was driven to participation in one mode or another (21). The consequent “intensely personal and autobiographical nature” of American First...

Invisible Bullets: A Return to the 1910s in American Literary Studies

This essay-review considers Hazel Hutchison's The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War (2015) and Pearl James's The New Death: American Modernism and World War I (2013). It explores how these books open up the 1910s as a domain of rich, underexplored US literary activity and as a site of specific wartime experiences and discourses whose careful recovery freshly illuminates US fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. US literature and experiences of World War I, encompassing both militarized Europe and the US home front, receive particular attention.

Beyond the Trenches: Ol'ha Kobylians'ka’s Literary Response to the First World War

<p class="EW-abstract"><strong>Abstract:</strong> Ol'ha Kobylians'ka’s short stories about the First World War constitute a rare case of a Ukrainian woman writing on one of the greatest catastrophes in modern history, a subject neglected even in Ukraine. Drawing on recent scholarship on First World War literature, this research proves that Kobylians'ka’s war stories deserve a re-evaluation, not as long-ignored curiosities from the pen of Ukraine’s most sophisticated writer of the time, but as insightful psychological studies of Western Ukrainians and as valuable cultural documents that present an original perspective on the common European experience of 1914-1918. The article pays particular attention to Kobylians'ka’s creative assessment of the Austrian and Russian treatment of Western Ukrainians during different stages of the First World War, which exposes anew fatal political weaknesses in Europe’s old imperial order and facilitates a better understanding of why Ukrainians, like many other ethnic groups in Europe without a state of their own, began to pursue their national goals more aggressively as the war progressed. Alongside popular texts, such as “Na zustrich doli” (“To Meet Their Fate,” 1917), “Iuda” (“Judas,” 1917), and “Lyst zasudzhenoho voiaka do svoiei zhinky” (“A Letter from a Convicted Soldier to His Wife,” 1917), this article examines Kobylians'ka’s three little-known stories—“Lisova maty” (“The Forest Mother,” 1915), “Shchyra liubov” (“Sincere Love,” 1916), and “Vasylka” (“Vasylka,” 1922)—thus presenting the most complete analysis of Kobylians'ka’s war fiction in any language.</p><p class="EW-Keyword">Keywords: Modernist Literature, Literature of the First World War, Women Writings of the First World War, Ol'ha Kobylians'ka’s War Fiction</p>

Australasian contributions to the "shell shock" literature of World War I.

Australasians contributed to the medical literature on shell shock during and after World War I. AW Campbell, Elliot Smith, Carmalt Jones and AG Butler made significant contributions, and several 'frontline doctors' recorded astute observations.