The Great War and Women's Consciousness
Images of Militarism and Womanhood
Published on 15. December 1989
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-0-333-51403-0 (ISBN)
Description
Contemporary British culture is still heavy with the memory of 1914-18. Whether angry or sad, satirical or grief-stricken, literary memory of the Great War is dominated by the writings of Sassoon and Owen, Graves and Blunden. The clearest voice that reaches us from that era is the voice of the trench-poet, calling from the Western Front. It is a male voice. This voice, the resentful complaint of young men, has drowned out the sound of women, who also had something to say. Men spoke from beyond the firing-line, describing the horror of a zone where no woman was allowed. Propaganda and censorship shielded women. They also prevented men from knowing what women were trying to publish in an effort to understand what war entailed and to put a stop to it. This book is a study of what women wrote about militarism and the First World War.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Basingstoke
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Illustrations
illustrations, bibliography, index
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
Weight
450 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-333-51403-0 (9780333514030)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Content
The heroic pageantry of war - journalism, women war-correspondents 1914-16, and the ideology of war (Mildred Aldrich, May Sinclair, Mrs St Clair Stobart); mental flannel - a woman's diary 1913-16 - propaganda and the construction of consciousness (Vera Brittain); "The Magic of Adventure" - the Western Front and women's tales about the war zone, 1915-16 (May Cannan, Katherine Mansfield, Ellen La Motte, Mary Borden); "despised and rejected" - censorship and women's pacifist novels of the First World War, 1916-18 (Mary Hamilton, Rose Macaulay, Rose Allatini); best-sellers - women's best-selling novels, 1918-28 (May Sinclair, Cicely Hamilton, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall); memoirs of a generation - women's autobiographies and fictionalized war memoirs, 1929-33 (Enid Bagnold, Mary Borden, Evadne Price, Sylvia Pankhurst, Vera Brittain); "Old Unhappy, Far-off Things" - women's elegies, 1932-60 (Hilda Doolittle, Pamela Hinkson, Antonia White). Conclusion: "Forbidden Zone" - the Great War and women's myths. Appendices: dates of significant women writers and their war-writings; extracts from "The Defence of the Realm Act, 1914".