Reading London in Wartime

Reading London in Wartime PDF Author: William Cederwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351239058
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reading London in Wartime: Blitz, the People and Propaganda in 1940s Literature presents an expansive variety of writers and genres, including non-fiction and film approaches, to build a comprehensive social picture of the atmosphere during wartime London. From blitz and austerity to the nagging insistency of propaganda, this volume examines the representation of London in wartime and early post-war literature through each writer’s unique perspective on the pressures of 1940s city life. Exploring the use of London imagery, this book considers how literature redirects attention to individual, subjective experience at a time of enforced co-operation, uniformity and community. Unlike government information films and news broadcasts, which often used London to prop up prevailing clichés and stereotypes, and encouraged patriotic support for the war, literature had the freedom to express more recalcitrant truths. London writing of the 1940s was not a literature of opposition or dissent, but in offering more nuanced depictions of the period, it was a counterweight to propaganda and the general war temperament. In writing, the city becomes a more complex place, no longer the easy symbol of defiance and stoicism, of the shared sacrifice of ration book and war work.

Reading London in Wartime

Reading London in Wartime PDF Author: William Cederwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351239058
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reading London in Wartime: Blitz, the People and Propaganda in 1940s Literature presents an expansive variety of writers and genres, including non-fiction and film approaches, to build a comprehensive social picture of the atmosphere during wartime London. From blitz and austerity to the nagging insistency of propaganda, this volume examines the representation of London in wartime and early post-war literature through each writer’s unique perspective on the pressures of 1940s city life. Exploring the use of London imagery, this book considers how literature redirects attention to individual, subjective experience at a time of enforced co-operation, uniformity and community. Unlike government information films and news broadcasts, which often used London to prop up prevailing clichés and stereotypes, and encouraged patriotic support for the war, literature had the freedom to express more recalcitrant truths. London writing of the 1940s was not a literature of opposition or dissent, but in offering more nuanced depictions of the period, it was a counterweight to propaganda and the general war temperament. In writing, the city becomes a more complex place, no longer the easy symbol of defiance and stoicism, of the shared sacrifice of ration book and war work.

An End To Murder

An End To Murder PDF Author: Colin Wilson
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 1780335288
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 640

Get Book Here

Book Description
Creatively and intellectually there is no other species that has ever come close to equalling humanity’s achievements, but nor is any other species as suicidally prone to internecine conflict. We are the only species on the planet whose ingrained habit of conflict constitutes the chief threat to our own survival. Human history can be seen as a catalogue of cold-hearted murders, mindless blood-feuds, appalling massacres and devastating wars, but, with developments in forensic science and modern psychology, and with raised education levels throughout the world, might it soon be possible to reign in humanity’s homicidal habits? Falling violent crime statistics in every part of the world seem to indicate that something along those lines might indeed be happening. Colin and Damon Wilson, who between them have been covering the field of criminology for over fifty years, offer an analysis of the overall spectrum of human violence. They consider whether human beings are in reality as cruel and violent as is generally believed and they explore the possibility that humankind is on the verge of a fundamental change: that we are about to become truly civilised. As well as offering an overview of violence throughout our history – from the first hominids to the twenty-first century, touching on key moments of change and also indicating where things have not changed since the Stone Age – they explore the latest psychological, forensic and social attempts to understand and curb modern human violence. To begin with, they examine questions such as: Were the first humans cannibalistic? Did the birth of civilisation also lead to the invention of war and slavery? Priests and kings brought social stability, but were they also the instigators of the first mass murders? Is it in fact wealth that is the ultimate weapon? They look at slavery and ancient Roman sadism, but also the possibility that our own distaste for pain and cruelty is no more than a social construct. They show how the humanitarian ideas of the great religious innovators all too quickly became distorted by organised religious structures. The book ranges widely, from fifteenth-century Baron Gilles de Rais, ‘Bluebeard’, the first known and possibly most prolific serial killer in history, to Victorian domestic murder and the invention of psychiatry and Sherlock Holmes and the invention of forensic science; from the fifteenth-century Taiping Rebellion in China, in which up to 36 million died to the First and Second World Wars and more recent genocides and instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’, and contemporary terrorism. They conclude by assessing the very real possibility that the internet and the greater freedom of information it has brought is leading, gradually, to a profoundly more civilised world than at any time in the past.

The Enemy

The Enemy PDF Author: Jeffrey Meyers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100046637X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book Here

Book Description
Originally published in 1980 and nominated for the Duff Cooper Prize, this was the first biography of Wyndham Lewis and was based on extensive archival research and interviews. It narrates Lewis’ years at Rugby and the Slade, his bohemian life on the Continent, the creation of Vorticism and publication of Blast, and his experiences at Passchendaele, as well as his many love affairs, his bitter quarrels with Bloomsbury and the Sitwells, the suppressed books of the thirties, the evolution of his political ideas, his self-imposed exile in North America and creative resurgence during his final blindness. Jeffrey Meyers also describes Lewis’ relationships with Roy Campbell, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, T. E Lawrence, Hemingway, Huxley, Yeats, Auden, Spender, Orwell and McLuhan. As the self-styled Enemy emerges from the shadows, he is seen as an independent and courageous artist and one of the most controversial and stimulating figures in modern English art and literature.

Pound/Lewis

Pound/Lewis PDF Author: Ezra Pound
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811209328
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
The friendship of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis began in London in 1909, survived two European wars and the rise and fall of the totalitarian governments both men misguidedly supported, and lasted through Pound's years of confinement at St. Elizabeths, to Lewis's death in 1957. In Pound/Lewis, their correspondence of five decades is gathered for the first time; it proves a revealing reflection of their intense, always professional, mutual regard.

Some Sort of Genius

Some Sort of Genius PDF Author: Paul O'Keeffe
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619026422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A man of undoubted genius," T.S. Eliot said of Wyndham Lewis, ". . .but genius for what precisely it would be remarkably difficult to say." Painter and draughtsman, novelist, satirist, pamphleteer and critic, Wyndham Lewis's multifarious activities defy easy categorization. He launched the only twentieth century English avant–garde art movement, Vorticism, in 1914. Brilliant both as painter and writer, the precise, mechanistic formality of his visual style crossed over into a unique satirical prose which, emphasizing the external, turned his characters into automata. It enabled Lewis to pit himself against a prevailing orthodoxy, the stream of consciousness technique favoured by contemporaries as diverse as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Combining years of research with dry wit and creative storytelling, Paul O'Keeffe's Some Sort of Genius crackles with intense details of Lewis's work, life and times, simultaneously dismantling longstanding assumptions about his subject and offering brilliant new perspectives. Employing narrative creativity that reinvents the genre of biography itself, O'Keeffe delivers an unparalleled portrait that does full justice to Lewis's complexity. Throughout O'Keeffe's definitive account, readers will be introduced to one of the most compelling and misunderstood figures of twentieth century modernism.

The Murder Gang

The Murder Gang PDF Author: Neil Root
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750987219
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
They were an elite group of renegade Fleet Street crime reporters covering the most notorious British crime between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s. It was an era in which murder dominated the front and inside pages of the newspapers – the 'golden age' of tabloid crime. Members of the Murder Gang knew one another well. They drank together in the same Fleet Street pubs, but they were also ruthlessly competitive in pursuit of the latest scoop. It was said that when the Daily Express covered a big murder story they would send four cars: one containing their reporters, the other three to block the road at crime scenes to stop other rivals getting through. As a matter of course, Murder Gang members listened in to police radios, held clandestine meetings with killers on the run, made huge payments to murderers and their families – and jammed potatoes into their rivals' exhaust pipes so their cars wouldn't start. These were just the tools of the trade; it was a far cry from modern reporting. Here, Neil Root delves into their world, examining some of the biggest crime stories of the era and the men who wrote them. In turns fascinating, shocking and comical, this tale of true crime, media and social history will have you turning the pages as if they were those newspapers of old.

London

London PDF Author: Phil Baker
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789142571
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
City of cities, the modern world’s first great metropolis, London has shaped everything from clothing to youth culture. It has a unique place in the world’s memory, even as its role has changed from the capital of the planet to its playground, and as its lived history has mutated into the heritage industry. In this book, Londoner Phil Baker explores the city’s history and the London of today, balancing well-known major events with more curious and eccentric details. He reveals a city of almost unmatched historical density and richness. For Baker, London turns out to be Gothic in all senses of the word and enjoyably haunted by its own often bloody past. And despite extensive redevelopment, as he shows in this engaging and insightful book, some of the magic remains.

The American Mercury

The American Mercury PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Periodicals
Languages : en
Pages : 796

Get Book Here

Book Description


Routledge Library Editions: Wyndham Lewis

Routledge Library Editions: Wyndham Lewis PDF Author: Various Authors
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000808009
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1484

Get Book Here

Book Description
The 3 volumes in this set, originally published between 1963 and 1980 include the first biography of Wyndham Lewis (1882 - 1957) by the award winning biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, and 2 volumes edited by personal friends of Wyndham Lewis which give a unique insight into the man, his output and his concern with the conflict between the artist-intellectual and the rest of society. Lewis is arguably one of the major intellectual figures of the 20th Century. Equally talented as a writer and painter, Lewis was innovative and controversial and well-known as the driving force behind Vorticism, the avant-garde movement that flourished in London before the First World War. A versatile painter, Lewis’ literary output was prodigous and he mastered a variety of genres – novels, poetry, philosophy, sociology, travel writing, literary and art critic. A leading revolutionary in British painting and a writer of creative genius, Wyndham Lewis also knew personally Augustus John, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, who called Lewis ‘the most fascinating personality of our time’.

The Essential Russell Kirk

The Essential Russell Kirk PDF Author: Russell Kirk
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1684516145
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 583

Get Book Here

Book Description
As the author of The Conservative Mind and other seminal books, Russell Kirk is usually thought of as one of the American conservative political movement’s most important progenitors. But as this collection demonstrates, Kirk was perhaps at his best as an essayist. This volume also confirms that Kirk’s was principally a literary and historical conservatism that refused to fit the irreducible complexity of human experience to the requirements of any ideological straitjacket. With The Essential Russell Kirk, literary critic George A. Panichas captures the breadth and depth of Kirk’s intellectual project by gathering together forty-four of the most masterful of Kirk’s essays, along with a unique chronology told in Kirk’s own words and a substantial introduction that articulates the deep humanism that animated Kirk’s philosophy. The result is a carefully assembled volume that gives us a fuller picture of an extraordinary man and writer, one whose labors had, and continue to have, remarkable repercussions on the American literary and political landscape.