Culture In The Aftermath Flashcards
1
Q
When did the move towards disenchantment occur?
A
1927-28
2
Q
What was the general mood after 1927?
A
Despair world not worth it
3
Q
What did pre-war life seem like?
A
A million miles away, completely different
4
Q
How did the nature of heroism change in the war?
A
There could be no war hero in a war of attrition because so many people fighting and the nature of fighting with shells means people die at random
5
Q
What kind of war was ww1?
A
A machine war
6
Q
What had previously been done on war memorials lists that was no longer done?
A
Previously Victorian class heirarchy, offices were named first but after ww1 just in alphabetical order - as a mass
7
Q
Can you be a hero if it’s a duty?
A
No
8
Q
How does aldington feel about writing death of a hero?
A
Struggles to write it but feels like a catharsis, purging his sole
9
Q
What is important about 1928?
A
10 year anniversary of armistice
10
Q
Why were disenchanted books not written sooner?
A
People not ready to hear stories of despair, war and violence yet and people not really sure how to verbalise it yet, has to go through a period of processing
11
Q
How does sons o guns present the war differently?
A
Is nostalgic to wartime humour, wants to remember the good fun parts, silly depiction of people falling over and not keeping up.
12
Q
What is the name of the funny hopeless soldier character in rough road?
A
Doggie Trevor
13
Q
What do books like rough road and plays like son o guns show?
A
It is possible to mourn but also possible to laugh
14
Q
What did summers, director of The Battle of Coronel and the Falkland Islands, show in his depiction of war?
A
A desire for peace - gave a fair depiction of the Germans
15
Q
What did Walter summers,director of battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands, try to avoid in his depiction of the war?
A
Patriotic fervour, wanted to show things as they really were, not cover up or gloss over
16
Q
What does Napper argue they wanted from war films?
A
War to be remembered and captured and something to be taken from it that is of value, he says it’s all about empire and the guardians of peace
17
Q
How did war film makers such as Walter summers try to create authenticity?
A
Meticulous naval and military detail supplied by a litany expert of advisors, few studio sequences are carefully disguised,
18
Q
Why was it so important to Walter summers and other directors to achieve authenticity?
A
Opportunity to set the record straight about the battles, a memorial to the navy, an important and sober way to remember the losses and record what happened,
Also summers himself fought in the war and wanted it to be real
19
Q
What does Napper argue war films like battles by Walter summers try to set themselves against?
A
American war films, had American troops in battles that they were not in, also the old style of patriotic war films
20
Q
Who had been releasing war films long before summers?
A
Hollywood made big blockbuster films
21
Q
What’s a common theme across many texts written in the 20s 30s?
A
Disenchantment
22
Q
What is the concern that Lejeune raised about war films in 1926?
A
That they had the ability to rouse military passions in the audience
23
Q
What did Frayn say the War books boom was not?
A
“The time when Britain became disenchanted; it was when disenchantment became a popular mode of expression”
24
Q
When does Frayn say disenchantment began in Britain?
A
19th century, mapped onto the war and then heightened by its impact
25
How many copies were sold of Death of a Hero?
tens of thousands
26
What did Janet S K Watson note about what was important about remembrance of war after 1927?
"War was culturally important, now, not for what it had achieved but for what it had cost."
27
What does Janet S K Watson argue about resistance to disenchantment?
"Resistance to this perspective of betrayal and disenchantment was vociferous but ultimately overwhelmed."
28
Why did the idea of stocktaking or book keeping become a popular motif in 1927?
Taking stock of what had been lost, notion of costing the war a way of rationalising and making sense of it.
29
What does the idea of disenchantment mean for the war dead?
No longer venerated for acting on behalf of others in defense of values, but pitied for being duped
30
What must disenchantment not be confused with?
Anti-war sentiment or a belief the war was futile, men did their duty till the end
31
What takes precedence in All Quiet on the Western Front?
negatives, not about realistic depiction but a reimagining from a late 1920s point of view
32
What did the international success of All Quiet and Journey's End indicate?
A huge potential market for disenchanted literature, authors were quick to seize the opportunity.
33
Why were texts often associated with former combatants?
Gave the impression of credibility, military identification was often present on the cover.
34
What did Frayn say Journey's End did to heroism?
Reconceptualised it to match attritional warfare, sacrifice no longer glorious and the physicality of war experience is overpowering, knightly rules of conduct no longer apply
35
Why was the author Sherriff surprised by Journey's End's reception?
Described it as a "war play in which not a word was spoken against the war, in which no word of condemnation was uttered by any of its characters"
36
What happens in the first half of Death of a Hero?
brutal satire of Victorian conventions and values, lays blame for the war an attitudes that supported it at their feet
37
What was the post-war decade for Aldington?
A continuing struggle to readjust to civilian life
38
Did Aldington write Death of a Hero on first attempt?
No, struggled to write it
39
What did Aldington describe the process of writing Death of a Hero as?
cathartic, said it 'purged my bosom of perilous stuff that had been poisoning me for a decade'
40
What does Frayn describe Aldington's position towards war as?
a complex mixture of willingness to fight and a belief that the war was enduring too long
41
What had to happen before Death of a Hero could be published?
Major cuts to avoid prosecution in the UK, even more so the US edition. Swearing removed, sex scenes removed, prostitute scenes removed
42
What did Aldington say to H.D about All Quiet?
That the war had been so brutal its brutality cannot be exaggerated - impossiblity of hyperbole implies there can be no stylistic excess
43
What does John Morris, literary critic, say Aldington does to the novel?
sacrifices it to the angry exposition of ideas and feelings
44
What does literary critic Walter Allen describe Death of a Hero as?
'a formless novel, incoherent and hysterical.'
45
What does Santanu Das say that Aldington's foregrounding of war as an exclusively male experience cloak?
A deep anxiety about gender and sexuality
46
Say the quote from Death of a Hero emphasising masculinity?
'These men were men. There was something intensely masculine about them... they had been where no woman and no half man had ever been, and could endure to be'
47
What dealing with death as a choice do?
Helped with coping the people chose to die
48
A.C. Ward, literary critic, writing in 1930 said Death of a Hero did exactly what?
Expressed the mood of thousands in England and served as a drainage channel for the suppressed indignations which had troubled them
49
Why did Evadne Price, writer of Not so Quiet, write her book?
Commissioned to write a women's response to All Quiet
50
What did Price base Not So Quiet on?
The diaries of Winifred Young, an ambulance driver
51
What helped Not So Quiet to become a bestseller?
It's familiar title and popular form
52
What is not spared in Not So Quiet?
Details of injury - "war is dirty. There's no glory in it. Vomit and blood."
53
What does Frayn describe the war books boom as?
the culmination of the ongoing attempts to interpret and move beyond the war
54
What did narratives around the war do in the late 20s that they had not done before?
Moved into a coherent and widely accepted line focused on disenchantment, before had been unstable
55
How does Susan Kingsley Kent argue the war became portrayed in Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain?
Not as a conflict between great powers, or even of men and material, but primarily as a psychological event
56
What did Valentine Wannop say related to aftershocks in Ford's Parade's End?
"Hitherto she had thought of the war as physical suffering only; now she saw it only as mental torture."
57
What does Jay Winter say the concept of shell shock has become in our understandings of the great war?
"a prism through which much of the cultural history of the 1914-1918 war has been viewed." a metaphor for size scope and consequences of modern industrialised warfare
58
What did rituals of remembrance that turned back to earlier traditional forms of expression provide for many sections of British society?
comfort or a sense of familiarity
59
What does Kingsley Kent argue countless and disparate accounts told during and after the war show?
"expressed convictions that the traumas of war had torn them to pieces, fragmented their existences, utterly disrupting the flow of their natural lives"
60
What does Kingsley Kent in Aftershocks say conventional historiography paints the period as?
One dominated by moderate conservatism
61
Who is the comforting and reassuring figure that personifies 1920s moderate conservatism for Kingsley Kent?
Stanley Baldwin
62
How did Baldwin change the conservative party in the interwar period?
In order to prevent class war becoming a reality, he transformed public face from hating socialism and promoting the propertied to one that represented the whole nation
63
What did Baldwin's message of a unified Englishness depend upon?
A contrast, something that is unEnglishness
64
What does Kingsley Kent suggest recovery from trauma requires?
Requires the individual victim to construct a coherent story comprised of prewar whole self, traumatised fragmented self and recovered integrated self
65
When did stories of individuals traumatised by the war start to appear?
In 1928
66
What were conservatives calling for as early as 1922?
Domesticity, quietude and safety first
67
Which historians notes the abandonment of a broad "British" identity for a smaller "English" identity?
Peter Mandler
68
What did the he abandonment of a broad "British" identity for a smaller "English" identity involve?
Pulling back from European, world and imperial affairs and focusing on a much narrower field of view
69
Why does Susan Kingsley Kent argue Britons narrated a particular story of themselves and their nation?
It responded to their needs to put the pieces back together, to reestablish wholeness, completeness and continuity.
70
What did Kingsley Kent suggest the existence of an empire containing a multitude of racial and ethnic peoples afforded the British?
An opportunity to work out their anxieties through violence actions that would not, ordinarily, be tolerated at home
71
What has the shell shocked solider come to exemplify?
The individual conditioned by the history of the twentieth century
72
What does Jean Comaroff argue about 'cultural ontology'?
People in particular times and places arrive at various conceptualisaitons of selfhood that make sense within the circumstances of those times and places, that resonate with social economic political and cultural practice that prevail
73
When does Kingsley Kent suggest the association of trauma with mental injury emerges?
middle of the nineteenth century with onset of railway accidents
74
How many people suffered extreme wounds in the war? How many lost limbs? How many lost sight?
500,000 suffered extreme wounds, 240,000 lost limbs, 10,000 lost sight
75
Were non combatants unaffected by the war?
Of course not, shared the devastation and sense of loss but to a lesser degree of horror. They could not understand on a full level the feelings of the battlefield
76
What caused deep seated fear among the civilian population in 1917?
Raids over London by German aircraft
77
What did Gibbs say about England during the war?
"England was no longer safe in her island. An island people invaded for thousands of years were suddenly shocked with the knowledge that the sea about them was no longer an impassable gulf between them and foreign foes."
78
What did The Lancet come to accept by March 1916?
It had come to accept the reality of civilian war neuroses, stating 'it should not be forgotten that the nervous strain to which the civilian is exposed to' at home
79
What does Kingsley Kent argue the nature and scope of the flu pandemic compelled medical authorities to do?
Abandon their ordinarily clinical accounts and describe the situation in highly charged, graphic language.
80
What did a physician tell an inquest panel in October 1918?
That doctors were fighting at home a foe as bad as the Huns
81
What did the flu leave behind?
Many survivors with a variety of mental symptoms
82
How were flu survivors often represented by the press?
Similar to how sufferers of shell shock were described
83
What is Ford Maddox Ford's famous statement about the aftermath?
"You may say that everyone who had taken physical part in the war was then mad" "No one could have come through that shattering experience and still view life and mankind with any normal vision"
84
Why were some men sad about returning from the trenches?
There they found a camaraderie they could find nowhere else - leaving their comrades produced a sense of disconnection from anything meaningful and a sense of alienation
85
How did the soldier Herbert Read describe soldiers after the war?
As demobilised particles
86
How did Guy Chapman describe his battalion?
"I was it, and it was I"
87
What did people returning from the war expect and not receive?
Respect and dignity
88
What percentage of the unemployed had been members of the armed forces?
2/3
89
What did Kingsley Kent argue it took ten years for veterans to do after leaving the war?
to compose the narrative that gave meaning to their experiences adequately
90
What did modernist narratives such as Mrs Dalloway and The Waste Land focus on more than texts preceding had done?
Inward facing, focus on the psychological impacts and psychological mood of Britain - trying to capture the mind authentically
91
What was Nevinson trying to achieve in his painting Amongst the Nerves of the World?
Trying to capture London's mood, responding to the feeling of disenchantment and loss and how to express visually new social fissures
92
How does Nevinson's Victoria Embankment (1924) capture the sense of isolation and imagery according to Michael Walsh?
Uses eerily soft colours, wintry colours
93
What did Nevinson's Victoria Embankment encapsulate about 1924?
"It was too soon for outright anger, and yet far too late for protest"
94
How was americanisation received in London?
Not welcome, felt to be an unthreatening novelty, others felt it was a cultural invasion and a menace to Englishness
95
Was Nevinson happy about americanisation?
No, he was a patriot
96
Where does Michael Walsh suggest Nevinson wishes to escape?
The metropolis, seeking instead harmony, convalescence and traquility
97
How does Samuel Hynes describe 1920s culture?
"a damaged nation of damaged men, damaged institutions and damaged hopes and faiths'
98
What does the character of septimus smith repesent in Mrs Dalloway?
A pointed criticism of mental illness and depression
99
Why might Woolf have been so concerned about the treatment of people suffering from shell shock?
Struggled with bipolar herself and suffered many orders of the rest cure
100
What is there an overwhelming presence of in Mrs Dalloway?
The passage of time and impending fate of death - Big ben rings each half hour
101
Why was there a great silence around the flu pandemic?
Stoicism, "stiff upper lip" encouraged by the government, shadowed in the aftermath of war, flu seen as less important illness
102
What does Virginia Woolf's essay 'On Being Ill' seek to establish illness as?
a serious subject of literature along the lines of jealousy, love and battle
103
What does Virginia Woolf argue in 'On Being Ill' that literature focuses on?
the mind
104
Why might Virginia Woolf have written about making illness a serious subject in 1926?
Illness is such a big part of culture in this time, she wonders how it can be so suppressed in literature.
105
What is the Spanish influenza of 1918-1919 characterized as?
the forgotten pandemic
106
What does Mark Honisbaum argue in Regulating the 1918-1919 pandemic?
stoicism exhibited by people was amplified in the columns of the times and Daily Mail and is best viewed as a performance, an emotional style that reflected the politicization of 'dread' in war as an emotion with the potential to undermine morale
107
What does Mark Honinsbaum say people actually reacted to the flu as though?
Dread still became attached to influenza as it progressively got worse and therefore attempts to regulate the civilian response failed
108
What did The Times famously say about the pandemic in December 1918?
Never since the Black Death has such a plague swept over the face of the world and never perhaps has a plague been more stoically accepted.
109
What does Niall Johnson suggest the flu pandemic was?
a bit player in the larger story of the great war
