In most European countries, the horrific legacy of 1939–45 has made it quite difficult to remember the war with much glory. Despite the Anglo-American memory narrative of saving democracy from totalitarianism and the Soviet epic of the Great Patriotic War, the fundamental experience of war for so many Europeans was that of immense personal losses and often meaningless hardships. The anthology…
The Grand Tour was a journey to continental Europe undertaken by British nobility and wealthy landed gentry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a rite of passage, the Tour also played an important role in the formation of contemporary notions of elite masculinity. Examining letters, diaries and other records left by Grand Tourists, tutors and their families, this book demonstrat…
An Equal Burden forms the first scholarly study of the Army Medical Services in the First World War to focus on the roles and experiences of the men of the ranks of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). These men, through their work as stretcher bearers and orderlies, provided a range of labour, both physical and emotional, in aid of the sick and wounded. They were not professional medical careg…
Hensley and Steer look to join the conceptual tools of contemporary ecocriticism with the rich archive of nineteenth century thinking about imperial and ecological intertwinement. This collection of essays draws on that archive to demonstrate the relevance of Victorian thought for current theory and practice. Ecological Form argues that ecology, the empire, and literary thinking were inseparabl…
The 1990s witnessed a veritable explosion in women's writing in France, with a particularly exciting new generation of writers coming to the fore, names like Christine Angot, Marie Darrieussecq and Régine Detambel. Other authors such as Paule Constant, Sylvie Germain, Marie Redonnet and Leïla Sebbar, who had begun publishing in the 1980s, claimed their mainstream status in the 1990s with new …
William Warners Syrinx, or a Sevenfold History, may be the first English novel. Unlike others of the time, though, Warner wrote a realistic novel whose ancestors include the adventure stories of Alexandrine romance, and focus not on the tales of an aristocratic class but on the lives of middle-class individuals. Wallace A. Bacon’s critical edition brings Warner’s important novel –with its…
This book draws together for the very first time examples of the 'aesthetic pacifism' practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. In addition, the book outlines the stories of those less well-known who shared the mind-set of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first 'total war'. The research for this study …
"Life in Transit is the long-awaited sequel to Shimon Redlich’s widely acclaimed Together and Apart in Brzezany, in which he discussed his childhood during the War and the Holocaust. Life in Transit tells the story of his adolescence in the city of Lodz in postwar Poland. Redlich’s personal memories are placed within the wider historical context of Jewish life in Poland and in Lodz during t…
In the story of the three baseball umpires, two novice umpires compete in boasting how they respect «truth» and the way things «really» are. One says, «I call them the way I see them»; the other, trying to trump this remark, responds, «I call them the way they are». Then enters the third, most seasoned umpire, saying, «They aren’t, until I call them». This book deals with two widel…
Thackeray: The Sentimental Cynic chronicles British novelist William Thackeray’s ambivalent attitudes toward society and traces his conduct during the major crises of his life in terms of those attitudes. Lambert Ennis examines the emotional tensions in Thackeray’s life and the impact they had in his work. In so doing, he illustrates key themes in Victorian studies more broadly: the questio…