Literature

This book is the first study to provide a detailed critical and historical survey of British literary culture in wartime. Concerned as much with war as with writing, it explores the significance of cultural representations of violence to the administration of the war effort. A theoretical account of the symbolic practices that connect military violence to policy provides a framework for analysing imaginative and documentary literature in its relation both to propaganda and to Peoples' War ideals of social reconstruction. The book evaluates wartime fictions and memoirs in the context of official and unofficial discourses about military aviation, the Blitz, campaigns in North Africa, war aims, the conscript Army and the Home Front, prisoners of war, and the Holocaust. It uncovers the processes by which the meanings the war had for participants were produced, and provides an extensive bibliographical resource for future scholarship.

This book examines the phenomenon of ‘yoof’ television programmes such as Network 7, The Word, The Big Breakfast, Snub TV, and Gamesmaster. Between 1987 and 1995 these and other related programmes formed part of a high-profile genre that in terms of both the personnel involved and their visual style continue to be influential in British television today. Examining these programmes the author reflects on the way in which the contemporary youth audience – Generation X – were being addressed. The author identifies an ambivalent viewing sensibility – ‘cynicism and enchantment’ – which encapsulates the attitude expressed by both the programmes and the audience. The distinctive aspect of the book is the way in which the author concentrates on the spatial and visual aspects of television. In particular her concern is to re-evaluate television as a specific experience, and one which has a central importance in young people's formation of identity and their sense of being in the world. Her central thesis also suggests that while television must necessarily be related to other visual media, it should be understood as having distinct aesthetic and phenomenological qualities of its own.

This book discusses the impact of mechanical recording on modern art and literature. Recording media, including photography and film, seemed to offer entirely new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, with both the usefulness of writing and the immediacy of sight. In particular, this book traces some of the more utopian projects to arise from this hope, including the Readie machine of Bob Brown, which was to turn stories and poems into strips of linguistic film. The influence of photography and film on the transatlantic avant garde is traced through three stages, from the early days of Camera Work, through the enthusiasm of Eugene Jolas and the contributors to his magazine transition, to the crisis created by the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, experienced with particular bitterness by the editors of the early film magazine, Close Up. Subsequent chapters describe the entirely new kind of sensory enjoyment brought into modern American fiction by the new media. What Fitzgerald calls spectroscopic gayety — the enjoyable disorientation of the senses by machine perception — turns out to be a powerful force in much American fiction, even that commonly celebrated for its hard-nosed realism. The revolutionary possibilities of this new spectatorship and its inevitable limitations are pursued through a number of examples, including Dos Passos, James Weldon Johnson, and Hemingway.

This book interrogates standard narratives about national identity in early modern England by examining the ways Catholics from the reign of Mary Tudor to the early 17th century contested and shaped discourses of the nation, patriotism, and Englishness. Accused by their opponents of espousing an alien religion, one orchestrated from Rome and sustained by Spain, English Catholics fought back by developing their own self-representations that emphasized how the Catholic faith was an ancient and integral part of true Englishness. After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance. English Catholics constructed narratives of their own religious heritage and identity, however, not only in response to Protestant polemic but also as part of intra-Catholic rivalries that pitted Marian clergy against seminary priests, secular priests against Jesuits, and exiled English Catholics against their co-religionists from other parts of Britain and Ireland. Drawing on recent reassessments of English Catholicism this study foregrounds the faultlines within and between the various Catholic communities of the Atlantic archipelago. The book examines a range of genres, texts, and documents both in print and manuscript, including ecclesiastical histories, polemical treatises, antiquarian tracts, and correspondence. The argument weaves together a rich historical narrative of people, events, and texts while also offering contextualized close readings of specific works by under-studied figures like Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Thomas Stapleton, and Richard Verstegan.

The book traces the course of what Oscar Wilde called his ‘ancient friendship’ with Carlos Blacker, ‘always the truest of friends and most sympathetic of companions’, from its beginning in the early 1880s to their tragic breakup in 1898. The friendship through the 1880s, ‘days of laughter and delight’ according to Wilde, was a halcyon time for both. Wilde’s long-time friend and first biographer, Robert Sherard, thought that ‘the days when I first met him [in 1883] were the happiest days he lived’, an opinion shared by a second biographer and friend, Vincent O’Sullivan. The 1890s, however, proved a less carefree time for both Wilde and Blacker. The first year of the decade witnessed the onset of what Blacker described as his ‘tempestuous affairs’, which continued to haunt him to the time of his marriage and the start of a ‘New Life’ in the middle of the decade, shortly before Wilde was brought to ruin by his own disastrous troubles. After a three-year separation, the two were reunited in Paris in March 1898, with the Dreyfus affair then at fever-pitch and the city, in Blacker’s words, ‘in a ferment’. During his extended residence abroad while his ‘tempestuous affairs’ played out, Blacker had formed a close friendship with the Italian military attaché in Paris, who, complicit with his German counterpart and fully informed about Dreyfus, confided ‘the whole & entire truth’ in sworn secrecy to Blacker who, in his emotionally charged reunion with Wilde, was impulsively moved to share the information with him. The effect of their chance involvement on the course of events in the affair proved fatal to their ‘ancient friendship’. On 25 June 1898, Blacker recorded prophetically in his diary, ‘After lunch just before dinner letter from Oscar which put an end to our friendship forever.’