Author: Samuel Hynes
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446467961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422
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Book Description
The Edwardian Turn of Mind brilliantly evokes the cultural temper of an age. The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a turbulent and dramatic struggle between the old and the new. Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters: Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors. His book is a portrait of a tumultuous time - out of which contemporary England was made.
Author: Samuel Hynes
Publisher: Princeton, N.J : Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
The Description for this book, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, will be forthcoming.
Author: Dennis Brown
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042020535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. International Ford Madox Ford Studies has been founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is based upon a particular theme or issue; each will relate aspects of Ford's work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade's End, which Anthony Burgess described as 'the finest novel about the First World War'; and Samuel Hynes has called 'the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman'. These works, together with his trilogy The Fifth Queen, about Henry VIII and Katharine Howard, are centrally concerned with the idea of Englishness. All these, and other works across Ford's prolific oeuvre, are studied here. Critics of Edwardian and Modernist literature have been increasingly turning to Ford's brilliant 1905 experiment in Impressionism, The Soul of London, as an exemplary text. His trilogy England and the English (of which this forms the first part) provides a central reference-point for this volume, which presents Ford as a key contributor to Edwardian debates about the 'Condition of England'. His complex, ironic attitude to Englishness makes his approach stand out from contemporary anxieties about race and degeneration, and anticipate the recent reconsideration of Englishness in response to post-colonialism, multiculturalism, globalization, devolution, and the expansion and development of the European Community. Ford's apprehension of the major social transformations of his age lets us read him as a precursor to cultural studies. He considered mass culture and its relation to literary traditions decades before writers like George Orwell, the Leavises, or Raymond Williams. The present book initiates a substantial reassessment, to be continued in future volumes in the series, of Ford's responses to these cultural transformations, his contacts with other writers, and his phases of activity as an editor working to transform modern literature. From another point of view, the essays here also develop the project established in earlier volumes, of reappraising Ford's engagement with the city, history, and modernity.
Author: Maria DiBattista
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195359542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
This collection of essays on modernist culture reassesses the convergence of low and high cultures, of socialist and aesthete, late Victorian and young Georgian, the popular and the coterie. Academic literary studies have until recently preferred to treat the "opaque," "difficult" writings of high moderns Conrad, Yeats, Woolf, and Eliot, and the more accessible work of the low moderns Kipling, Shaw, and Wells in separate categories. In contributions by scholars David Bromwich, Roy Foster, Edna Longley, Louis Menand, Edward Mendelson, and others, High and Low Moderns brings these writers into critical proximity. Essays on such topics as the public mourning of Queen Victoria, Florence Farr and the "New Woman," the Edwardian Shaw, Lady Gregory's attraction to Irish felons, and the high artistic uses of low entertainments--cinema, detective fiction, and journalism-- introduce a subtler model of modernism, in which "demotic" and "elite" cultural forms criticize, imitate, and address one another.
Author: Samuel Hynes
Publisher: Random House (UK)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468
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Book Description
The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a turbulent and dramatic struggle between the old and the new. This book offers a portrait of a tumultuous time - out of which contemporary England was made.
Author: Samuel Hynes
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446467988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Book Description
This is a study of a literary generation writing in a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. The pace of the time itself, the sense of time passing and an end approaching gave a special quality to the Thirties. The public world pressed insistently on the private world. For those who came of literary age - Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, Graham Greene, Isherwood and Orwell among them - writing became a form of action. In the process a generation discovered itself and found its own expression.
Author: Celia Malone Kingsbury
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
ISBN: 9780896724822
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
During wartime, paranoia, gossip, and rumor become accepted forms of behavior and dominant literary tropes. The Peculiar Sanity of War examines the impact of war hysteria on definitions of sanity and on standards of behavior during World War I. Drawing upon Joseph Conrad's comprehensive understanding of war's impact on soldiers and civilians alike, and extending Michel Foucault's construction of madness and reason, Kingsbury expands the definition of war neurosis to include peculiar sanity at home as well as on the front lines. While other investigations of World War I consider shell shock to be the only definable war madness, Kingsbury is the first to build a powerful argument around the insanity of the home front's vilification of the enemy. Ultimately, Kingsbury's study establishes peculiar sanity, among civilians and soldiers, as an inevitable response to war's madness. The Peculiar Sanity of War begins by locating the roots of war mania in Edwardian hypocrisy, then moves on to examine the way propaganda operates in nontraditional texts, such as housekeeping guides, and in the novels of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, and H. D. Celia Kingsbury's eloquent and moving book . . . brings together war and madness in unexpected ways. Beginning with a phrase from Joseph Conrad, she diagnoses the condition of a culture gone awry, a 'peculiar sanity.' . . . --from Laurence Davies's foreword
Author: Charles N. Genno
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487597444
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
This collection of eight essays in honour of the distinguished Canadian Germanist G.W. Field treats themes in German narrative prose of the First World War, the pre-war era, and the earliest of the Weimar Republic. The aim of the book is not to present a comprehensive study of the field, but rather to shed new light on specific problems. The essays are organized in the historical sequence of the events and situations to which they are related. The topics include discussions of the concept of war as presented by Robert Musil in Der Mann hone Eigenschaften; the treatment of war as a catalyst by the Expressionist writers Carl Sternheim and Leonhard Frank; the preservation of values in the face of war as dealt in Hesse's Demian; and an exploration of the effects of war on the individual and social values in the works of Salomo Friedländer and Alfred Döblin. An essay on H.G. Well's Mr. Britling Sees It Through helps to clarify the ways in which the reaction of German writers to the war may be viewed as specifically German by providing an outsider's point of view. The final chapter, a survey of the most recent literature on the topic, shows how much World War I lives on in the minds of German writers as the great turning point in German political and cultural history.
Author: Margaret MacMillan
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812994701
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 935
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Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Economist • The Christian Science Monitor • Bloomberg Businessweek • The Globe and Mail From the bestselling and award-winning author of Paris 1919 comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a fascinating portrait of Europe from 1900 up to the outbreak of World War I. The century since the end of the Napoleonic wars had been the most peaceful era Europe had known since the fall of the Roman Empire. In the first years of the twentieth century, Europe believed it was marching to a golden, happy, and prosperous future. But instead, complex personalities and rivalries, colonialism and ethnic nationalisms, and shifting alliances helped to bring about the failure of the long peace and the outbreak of a war that transformed Europe and the world. The War That Ended Peace brings vividly to life the military leaders, politicians, diplomats, bankers, and the extended, interrelated family of crowned heads across Europe who failed to stop the descent into war: in Germany, the mercurial Kaiser Wilhelm II and the chief of the German general staff, Von Moltke the Younger; in Austria-Hungary, Emperor Franz Joseph, a man who tried, through sheer hard work, to stave off the coming chaos in his empire; in Russia, Tsar Nicholas II and his wife; in Britain, King Edward VII, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and British admiral Jacky Fisher, the fierce advocate of naval reform who entered into the arms race with Germany that pushed the continent toward confrontation on land and sea. There are the would-be peacemakers as well, among them prophets of the horrors of future wars whose warnings went unheeded: Alfred Nobel, who donated his fortune to the cause of international understanding, and Bertha von Suttner, a writer and activist who was the first woman awarded Nobel’s new Peace Prize. Here too we meet the urbane and cosmopolitan Count Harry Kessler, who noticed many of the early signs that something was stirring in Europe; the young Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and a rising figure in British politics; Madame Caillaux, who shot a man who might have been a force for peace; and more. With indelible portraits, MacMillan shows how the fateful decisions of a few powerful people changed the course of history. Taut, suspenseful, and impossible to put down, The War That Ended Peace is also a wise cautionary reminder of how wars happen in spite of the near-universal desire to keep the peace. Destined to become a classic in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, The War That Ended Peace enriches our understanding of one of the defining periods and events of the twentieth century. Praise for The War That Ended Peace “Magnificent . . . The War That Ended Peace will certainly rank among the best books of the centennial crop.”—The Economist “Superb.”—The New York Times Book Review “Masterly . . . marvelous . . . Those looking to understand why World War I happened will have a hard time finding a better place to start.”—The Christian Science Monitor “The debate over the war’s origins has raged for years. Ms. MacMillan’s explanation goes straight to the heart of political fallibility. . . . Elegantly written, with wonderful character sketches of the key players, this is a book to be treasured.”—The Wall Street Journal “A magisterial 600-page panorama.”—Christopher Clark, London Review of Books
Author: Tami Biddle
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400824974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
A major revision of our understanding of long-range bombing, this book examines how Anglo-American ideas about "strategic" bombing were formed and implemented. It argues that ideas about bombing civilian targets rested on--and gained validity from--widespread but substantially erroneous assumptions about the nature of modern industrial societies and their vulnerability to aerial bombardment. These assumptions were derived from the social and political context of the day and were maintained largely through cognitive error and bias. Tami Davis Biddle explains how air theorists, and those influenced by them, came to believe that strategic bombing would be an especially effective coercive tool and how they responded when their assumptions were challenged. Biddle analyzes how a particular interpretation of the World War I experience, together with airmen's organizational interests, shaped interwar debates about strategic bombing and preserved conceptions of its potentially revolutionary character. This flawed interpretation as well as a failure to anticipate implementation problems were revealed as World War II commenced. By then, the British and Americans had invested heavily in strategic bombing. They saw little choice but to try to solve the problems in real time and make long-range bombing as effective as possible. Combining narrative with analysis, this book presents the first-ever comparative history of British and American strategic bombing from its origins through 1945. In examining the ideas and rhetoric on which strategic bombing depended, it offers critical insights into the validity and robustness of those ideas--not only as they applied to World War II but as they apply to contemporary warfare.
