Long shadows : the Second World War in British fiction and film / edited by Petra Rau.

Format:

Book

Conference/Event

Contributor:

Rau, Petra, 1969- editor.

Conference Name:

Second World War: Popular Culture and Cultural Memory (Conference) (2011 : University of Brighton)

Series:

Cultural expressions of World War II

Cultural expressions of World War II: interwar preludes, responses, memory

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--20th century--History and criticism--Congresses.

English fiction.

English fiction--21st century--History and criticism--Congresses.

Motion pictures--Great Britain--Congresses.

Motion pictures.

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

World War, 1939-1945.

World War, 1939-1945--Motion pictures and the war--Congresses.

War and literature.

War and motion pictures.

Great Britain.

Genre:

Conference papers and proceedings.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

vii, 309 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2016.

Summary:

Few countries attribute as much importance to the Second World War and its memory as Britain; arguably nowhere else has this conflict developed such longevity in cultural memory and retained such presence in contemporary culture. Long Shadows is about how literature and film have helped shape this process in Britain. More precisely, the essays collected here suggest that this is a continuous work in progress, subject to trans-generational revisions, political expediencies, commercial considerations, and the vicissitudes of popular taste. It would indeed be more accurate to speak of the meanings (plural) that the war has been given at various moments in British cultural life. These semantic variations and fluctuations in cultural import are rooted in the specificity of the British war experience, in the political aftermath of the war in Europe, and in its significance for Britain's postwar position on the global stage. In other words, the books and films discussed in these essays respond to how the war has been interpreted and remembered; what is at stake is the way in which the war has been emplotted as a hegemonic cultural narrative about Britain. Book jacket.

Contents:

Long shadows and blind spots / Petra Rau

Escaping 1945 : popular fiction and the end of the War / Gill Plain

"Remember the Torrin" : positioning in which we serve / Richard Farmer

"Drinking and drinking and screaming" : wartime sociality in Patrick Hamilton's The slaves of solitude / Eluned Summers-Bremner

Facing the future : children in postwar Britain / Allan Hepburn

"We shall never make a home of this" : Elizabeth Taylor's postwar reconstruction fiction / Paula Derdiger

"Someone should put it on record" : Storm Jameson and "witness literature" / Elizabeth Maslen

Postwar espionage fiction : memory and Fascism in emergency-state thinking / Adam Piette

"Knowledge of the working of bombs" : the strategic air offensive in rhetoric and fiction / Petra Rau

"A bomb made of words" : letter-writing in fictions of the Second World War / Victoria Stewart

"He wished to defend a country that wasn't his" : British subjects/British servicemen in Zadie Smith's White teeth and Andrea Levy's Small island / Michael Perfect

The Nazis in Britain : representations of the wartime occupation of the Channel Islands / Sue Vice

Dress, women's Holocaust survivor memoirs, and the "thoughtful" work of Linda Grant / Margaret D. Stetz.

Notes:

"This edited collection saw its beginnings in an international conference titled "The Second World War: Popular Culture and Cultural Memory," organized in 2011 by Lucy Noakes, Juliette Pattinson, and myself at the University of Brighton"--Acknowledgements.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780810133280

0810133288

9780810133297

0810133296

OCLC:

922728949