Modernism, History, and the Novel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2016

Russian Literature, 2015

The military efforts during the Napoleonic Wars gave rise to a large-scale cartographic enterprise across the European continent. As a medium of war, military maps served the purpose of orchestrating the "grand operations" of several distinct army corps in space. After the wars, however, the maps migrate into a different medium: the literary text. This article examines how Tolstoi's War and Peace grapples with a central problem for the 19th century novel, viz. the role of different media, literary and cartographic, in the representation and management of largescale war. Tolstoi, the author argues, transposes the military conflict to the representational level and stages a struggle between the two media and the different military theories of the time that accompany them. Operating at this meta-level, War and Peace serves as a highly complex and self-conscious examination of the media of war.

The Status of Rewriting in 20th - 21st century Art, Film and Literature, 2014

2015

Whilst Bakhtin’s core chapter from The Dialogic Imagination concerns itself with an exploration of the distinctive development of the novel, the 1938 essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ also offers us abundant means of clearing space for a fresh look at other areas of literature; as he himself points out: “the chronotope is developed in different ways in the various genres”. My article, therefore, examines concepts of the “artistic chronotope” in the trench lyric and examines representations of temporality within the unique site-specific artwork of the Great War canon. Central to this discussion is Bakhtin’s own definition: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” The paper engages with this notion and Bakhtin’s wider descriptions of chronotopic form in terms of the poetry of Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon; as well as some of the lesser-known poets of the time, like Eleanor Farjeon. I attempt to set this discussion within the critical, historical and theoretical contexts of the period in order to present the Great War canon as one engaged with unique forms of temporal-spatial articulation.

E-rea, 2020

The present issue “Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of War and Peace (1914-1950)” continues the probe into modernist prose begun in a previous issue of E-rea “Modernist non-fictional narratives” (Paterson and Reynier). The focus has narrowed to examining British and Irish modernist writers’ non-fictional writings about war and peace. All kinds of essays, reviews, pamphlets, diaries, autofiction, reportage, letters, and so on, produced between the beginning of the First World War to the aftermath of the Second World War, are examined here. These texts, featuring more or less fugitive writings, have sometimes seemed peripheral to the poetry and fiction that made these writers famous. However, there are good reasons to examine them. In considering what constitutes an author and an oeuvre, Foucault concludes “the author is a particular source of expression who, in more or less finished forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in a text, in letters, fragments, drafts, and so forth” (127). Moreover, there persists an intuition that in this period, non-fictional prose can be particularly illuminating. Something about the pressures of the times created an impulse towards – and effect upon – non-fictional prose. Broadly speaking, our contributors conclude, it is possible to divine two trends, not entirely contradictory: the first towards sober practical purposeful prose that does something in the world; the second toward prose that is disrupted, elliptical, generically fluid, or otherwise multilayered or difficult. Our contributors find these texts provide new insight in the way they represent and appraise their subjects, especially when it comes to narratives of war and peace. 2Why war and peace? A wider justification for this issue is that which surely colours all critical perspectives. It records a twofold response: to what was happening then, and to what is happening now. Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. (ix) 3So writes Hannah Arendt in the “Preface” (1950) to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the date of 1950 conveniently marking the end of our survey. If anything here should sound familiar, it might be remembered that a belief in the cyclical nature of history was resurgent precisely in the period under discussion. Even Samuel Beckett chose to frame discussion of modern understanding not only through ‘the new thing that has happened’ but ‘the old thing that has happened again’ (Disjecta 70).) From our perspective, then, examining non-fictional narratives of the period 1914-1950 seems peculiarly cogent. Their prescience should not be overemphasized: historical parallels have a tendency to be overwrought, in both senses. We remember Arendt herself was trying to understand the present by looking back at the past. The particular past she reflects upon in the first half of the twentieth century appeared uniquely ravaging and violent. Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third Word War between the two remaining world powers. (ix) 4This period under discussion, containing the First World War, many subsequent revolutions and civil wars, the march towards the Second World War and its aftermath, is both varied and unparalleled. Following Eric Hobsbawm’s demarcation of what he calls ‘the age of catastrophes’, we argue, therefore, that it makes sense to consider the period, as Arendt does here, as a time which changed civilization and in consequence changed non-fictional prose. 2 The major art installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London marked one hund (...) 3 See for instance, the work of Jay Winter, Tom Slevin and the Atlas of the Irish Revolution (Crowley (...) 4 Claire Wills’s excellent cultural study stresses the perhaps surprising fertility of the literary s (...) 5No doubt this period reemerges now with particular urgency because of the number and significance of recent commemorations and cultural events that have sought to remember, recover, re-evaluate, reinterpret, and reimagine this past, both officially and unofficially. In Ireland, for instance, the ongoing government-sponsored Decade of Centenaries (1912-1923, covering the period from the Ulster Covenant to the end of the Civil War) has contributed enormously to new understandings of the complexities of the conflicts of that period: notably, bringing new focus on the place of women in rebellion and social change, unearthing details of forgotten atrocities, and drawing attention to the fate of the enormous number of Irish participants (both nationalist and unionist) in the First World War. In Britain and France (and beyond) centenaries surrounding the First World War have been marked in a number of ways, through official commemorations and cultural responses. There have been new exhibitions in the Imperial War Museum, and public installations, such as Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London.2 In the cinema, Peter Jackson’s lovingly colourized documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and Sam Mendes’s dramatic 1917 (2020), have in different ways highlighted individual and colonial participation in the war, joining new productions of old classics such as R.C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End (1928). Multiple publications by historians and cultural scholars have brought new meanings and complexity to a wider period still very much close to mind.3 The First World War has never been far away from the popular imagination, not least because of the continuing effects of the prose (and poetry) of this period. And in Britain, at least, the Second World War has retained a central place in popular culture (in Ireland that period of neutrality during what was dubbed euphemistically “the emergency” still requires attention).4 Anniversaries, recreations, histories and films have, if anything, gathered a new impetus, perhaps because survivors of this war are every year getting fewer.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Vol. 19, Nos 1-2, Fall 2006), 2006

Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2015

2019

The first essay in "Pities" is a small exploratory essay on British WWI poet, Wilfred Owen. During my American Modernism course in Spring 2019, I found great interest in how the emergence of advanced warfare shifted literature in a time that was already advancing technologically and economically. I became obsessed, almost, with the brutality of Owen’s works. This led to the expansion of the paper into my final essay for the course in which I compared Owen to Robinson Jeffers, an American anti-war poet. By bringing in Jeffers, I was able to accurately portray how both countries were affected by the war and set the precedent of war literature to follow.

Atlantis Journal of the Spanish Association For Anglo American Studies, 2014