The Peculiar Sanity of War

The Peculiar Sanity of War
Author: Celia Malone Kingsbury
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780896724822

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

Sciences of Modernism

Sciences of Modernism
Author: Paul Peppis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2014-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107660084

Sciences of Modernism examines key points of contact between British literature and the human sciences of ethnography, sexology and psychology at the dawn of the twentieth century. The book is divided into sections that pair exemplary scientific texts from the period with literary ones, charting numerous collaborations and competitions occurring between science and early modernist literature. Paul Peppis investigates this exchange through close readings of literary works by Claude McKay, E. M. Forster, Mina Loy, Rebecca West and Wilfred Owen, alongside science books by Alfred Haddon, Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, Bernard Hart and William Brown. In so doing, Peppis shows how these competing disciplines participated in the formation and consolidation of modernism as a broad cultural movement across a range of critical discourses. His study will interest students and scholars of the history of science, literary modernism, and English literature more broadly.

Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2017-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004344144

For the centenary of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), this volume originally re-examines some well-known issues surrounding the text and its “mad about writing” author: the Conrad-Ford friendship and literary collaboration; Modernist agenda(s) and Impressionist techniques; genre innovations and philosophical questions. The dialogue between established and young Ford scholars produces a challenging kaleidoscope of insights into the work of this controversial English writer and his perennial novel. Contributors are: Asunción López-Varela Azcárate, Marc Ouellette, Lucie Boukalova, Allan Pero, Dean Bowers, Aimee L. Pozorski, Chris Forster, J. Fitzpatrick Smith, Edward Lobb, Timothy Sutton, Gabrielle Moyer, Joseph Wiesenfarth.

Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature

Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature
Author: Daniel Darvay
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2016-09-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319326619

This book explores the complex relationship between British modernism and the Gothic tradition over several centuries of modern literary and cultural history. Illuminating the blind spots of Gothic criticism and expanding the range of cultural material that falls under the banner of this tradition, Daniel Darvay focuses on how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British writers transform the artifice of Gothic ruins into building blocks for a distinctively modernist architecture of questions, concerns, images, and arguments. To make this argument, Darvay takes readers back to early exemplars of the genre thematically rooted in the English Reformation, tracing it through significant Victorian transformations to finally the modernist period. Through writers such as Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, this book ultimately expands the boundaries of the Gothic genre and provides a fresh, new approach to better understanding the modernist movement.

Late-Victorian Heroic Lives in the Writings of Frank Mundell

Late-Victorian Heroic Lives in the Writings of Frank Mundell
Author: Moniez Baptiste
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017-08-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527500640

This study explores the work of Frank Mundell, a late-Victorian author for the Sunday School Union. Mundell focused on heroism and represented various kinds of heroic deeds and figures, regardless of gender, in his books. Writing for educative, as well as entertaining, purposes, he avoided the use of didacticism and he endeavoured to combine the traditional and the modern in the stories he chose to tell. Mundell’s favourite format was that of the prosopography, putting together several heroic lives or incidents. He was careful to dedicate each of his volumes to one topic in particular, thus distinguishing the different types of heroic deeds from one another. His writings belong to four series, or collections, each highlighting a specific version of heroism, from instances of the mundane performed in a familial context to extraordinary deeds. He wrote about such bold acts as those featuring in the stories of brave firemen fighting devouring flames, fearless sailors in tempestuous seas, determined miners risking their lives to save their comrades, or intrepid explorers facing perils in the wide world. This book analyses each of his publications, highlighting the elements belonging to his representation of heroism as a whole.

Conrad and Nature

Conrad and Nature
Author: Lissa Schneider-Rebozo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351721364

This collection of twelve original essays by established and emerging scholars, seeks to explore these landscapes in Conrad’s work and serves as a look into our own recent history at a pivotal time us as we come to realize how our actions, choices and even our mere presence directly impacts the natural world that delicately sustains us. The text engages with work by Joseph Conrad, storied British merchant marine and official British citizen as of 1886.

Ford Madox Ford's Literary Contacts

Ford Madox Ford's Literary Contacts
Author: Paul Skinner
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2007
Genre: English literature
ISBN: 9042022485

The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. This series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies was founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is based upon a particular theme or issue; and relates aspects of Ford's work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. The present book is part of a large-scale reassessment of his roles in literary history. 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'. But he was a prolific writer in many different modes, which include criticism of others' writing, and reminiscences of the many writers he had known. One of the most striking features of his career is his close involvement with so many of the major international literary groupings of his time. In the South-East of England at the fin-de-siècle, he collaborated for a decade with Joseph Conrad, and befriended Henry James, and H. G. Wells. In Edwardian London he founded the English Review, publishing these writers alongside his new discoveries, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. After the war he moved to France, founding the transatlantic review in Paris, taking on Hemingway as a sub-editor, discovering another generation of Modernists such as Jean Rhys and Basil Bunting, and publishing them alongside Joyce and Gertrude Stein. He spent more time in America from the later 1920s, spending time with Southern Agrarians, and poets such as William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Robert Lowell. He was always a tireless promoter of younger writers, reading manuscripts and recommending them to publishers. This book takes Ford's 'literary contacts' to include such creative friendships, editorial involvements, and influential biographical encounters; and they form the most substantial, central section on 'Contemporaries and Confrères', covering figures like Proust, Carlos Williams, Rebecca West, Herbert Read, and Hemingway. But it also explores contacts with literary texts. The first section on 'Predecessors' considers the impact of Ford's reading of Trollope, George Eliot, and Turgenev. The final section discusses 'Successors' writers such as Graham Greene, Burgess, and A. S. Byatt, whose literary contacts with Ford have been as his admiring readers and eloquent critics. Ford has been described as 'a writer's writer'. This volume reveals how true that has been, and in how many ways, as it sheds new light on his relationships with other writers, both familiar and surprising. It includes two pieces published here for the first time: one by Ford himself, on Turgenev; the other a memoir about Ford by his contemporary, Marie Belloc Lowndes (the sister of Hilaire Belloc).

For Home and Country

For Home and Country
Author: Celia M. Kingsbury
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2010-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0803228325

For Home and Country examines the propaganda that targeted noncombatants on the home front in the United States and Europe during World War I. Cookbooks, popular magazines, romance novels, and government food agencies targeted women in their homes, especially their kitchens, pressuring them to change their domestic habits. Children were also taught to fear the enemy and support the war through propaganda in the form of toys, games, and books. And when women and children were not the recipients of propaganda, they were often used in propaganda to target men. By examining a diverse collection of literary texts, songs, posters, and toys, Celia Malone Kingsbury reveals how these pervasive materials were used to fight the war's cultural battle.