Culture in camouflage : war, empire, and modern British literature / Patrick Deer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Deer, Patrick, 1966-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

World War, 1914-1918--Literature and the war.

World War, 1914-1918.

World War, 1939-1945--Literature and the war.

World War, 1939-1945.

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Physical Description:

x, 329 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2009]

Summary:

Culture in Camouflage aims to remap the history of British war culture by insisting on the centrality and importance of the literature of the Second World War. The book offers the first comprehensive account of the emergence of modern war culture, arguing that its exceptional forms and temporalities force us to reappraise British cultural modernity.

The book explores how writers like Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sasson, Wilfred Owen, T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, James Hanley, Rex Warner, EvelynWaugh, Alexander Baron, Keith Douglas, Henry Green, and Graham Greene contested the dominant narratives of war projected by an enormously powerful and persuasive mass media and culture industry. Patrick Deer reads war literature as one element in an expanded cultural field, which also includes popular culture and mass communications, the productions of war planners and military historians, projections of new technologies of violence, the fantasies and theories of strategists, and the material culture of total war.

Modern war cultures, Deer contends, are defined by their drive to normalize conflict and war-making, by their struggle to colonize the entire wartime cultural field, and by their claim to monopolize representations and interpretation of the conflict. But the mobilization of cultural formations during wartime reveals the constitutive contradictions at the heart of modern ideas of culture. The Great War failed to produce a popular war culture on the home front, provoking instead an extraordinary literature of protest, yet the military authorities struggled to regain their oversight on the battlefield. The interwar years saw a massive effort to make strategic fantasies a reality; if the technology of imperial air power or mobile armoured warfare did not yet exist, culture could be mobilized to shore up the ramshackle war machine. During World War Two a fully fledged British war culture offered a nation in crisis the vision of a fully mobilized island fortress, a loyal empire, and a modernized war machine ready to wage a futuristic total war. Working in the shadow of this war culture, British World War Two writers challenged these dominant narratives and imaginaries with extraordinary courage and creativity.

Contents:

Introduction 1

War culture and war literature 4

The Second World War culture boom 9

1 From the Panorama of Battle to the Labyrinth of Total War: British War Culture, 1914-1929 15

'I used to be able to visualize things': the Great War and modern vision 15

Recapturing the oversight of war 19

'Forever England': war poetry and deathly vision 25

'Thoughts by England given': war correspondents and propaganda 32

Modernism in camouflage 43

Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and the recovery of strategic vision 50

2 The Empire of the Air: British Air Power and the Second World War 61

The air war and modern memory 61

From Lawrence of Arabia to Aircraftsman Ross: air power's imperial romance 64

The pleasures and terrors of the 'air-minded' 73

'The Bombers alone provide the means to victory': the triumph of the aerial view of battle 80

From The Aerodrome to 'Airstrip One': Rex Warner and the empire of the air 84

Virginia Woolf's 'Thoughts on Peace' in an Air Raid 91

Aces and air marshalls: the air war in the eyes of its participants 96

3 Culture in the Blackout: Living through the Blitz, 1940-4 106

Blackouts on the Imperial Home Front 106

'Taking it' on the Home Front: Humphrey Jennings' imaginary war 112

Propaganda, Surveillance, and Secrecy 119

'More like a film': Henry Green's visions of the Blitz 123

Listen to Britain: radio oracles of the people's war 132

'Play unknown, actors unseen': James Hanley's No Directions 141

4 Ghosts inside the 'Island Fortress': Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Haunting of the Home Front 151

The haunting of the Home Front 151

'At Home' in the Blitz: Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear 155

'I cannot paint or photograph like this': Elizabeth Bowen's 'savage warnings' 168

'Songs my father taught me': exhuming Deep England 173

'It will have no literature': Ireland, spying, and surveillance 180

The 'saving hallucination': confronting the ghosts of war 186

5 'Simplify Me When I'm Dead': The Battle over Memory and National Culture 192

'When in a year collapse particular memories' 192

'No letters please': the uses of poetry 195

'Why not war writers?': the blackout within the war machine 200

'Literature is common ground': Virginia Woolf outside the leaning tower 201

New puritans and word controllers: George Orwell's culture wars 211

Total Waugh: dandies and queer aesthetes on the Home Front 218

'Outside your own field of vision': Alexander Baron and the radical view of battle 224

Conclusion: The Boom Ends: The War on British literature of the 1940s 235.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199239887

0199239886

OCLC:

277068148