In this article, I offer a close reading of Merleau-Ponty's Les Aventures de la dialectique (1955). This work of political philosophy, which culminates in a long chapter on Sartre that sealed the rupture between the two thinkers, also reflects on the politics of literature. While their quarrel has been widely discussed, the role of literature in this regard has received little attention. I will show how the notion of literary engagement, coined in 1945, was renegotiated during the Cold War through competing views of history. Adopting an intellectual-historical approach, I analyse how engagement is entwined with political conjunctures and philosophical positions.
Although the most characteristic fictional mode of the period, the mid-twentieth-century novel sequence attracts little critical attention. Of particular interest for exploring its temporal distinctiveness are those autobiographical sequences that were acclaimed in their 1950s and 1960s time as Second World War books, but which were, this essay argues, essentially Cold War endeavours. Focusing on Anthony Powell's representation of his wartime work with the forces-in-exile of occupied Poland in A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75), this essay considers the unrivalled affordances of the novel series for the reanimation of historical events not as past but as ongoing process.
Scholars have concluded that Cervantes' classic novel Don Quixote has a significant Jewish dimension, but they have struggled to clarify this supposition. The dominant approach looks for hidden meanings in Don Quixote, and speculates about how these might be drawn from a late thirteenth century Jewish mystical text, the Zohar. An impasse has been reached: the Zohar-Cervantes connection has been largely discredited, but important commentators nonetheless regard the novel's protagonist as likely being a convert from Judaism. By emphasising trends in Jewish mysticism that were coterminous with Cervantes' writing, this article argues that considerations of thematic overlap, converso identity dynamics, and post-trauma expression encourage the use of another text, Haim Vital's dream diary (Sefer Ha-Hezyonot), as a basis for measuring Don Quixote's Jewishness. The article exemplifies how discussions of 'Jewish' characteristics of canonical literary texts might be reasonably framed.
This article analyses the similarities between Juliana and Judith, two Old English poems representing heroines confronting their heathen assailants. The poems, devoted to a female saint and female biblical figure, respectively, display instances of physical and emotional violence and domination directed by women characters towards their un-Christian and heathen opponents. The article discusses the psychological potency of deploying depictions of feminine violence for mixed-gender audiences of the poems. Analysing how the poems apply the emotions of disgust, fear, and, predominantly, shame as motivating emotional states, this article proves their effectiveness in depicting militant femininity in an ideological confrontation with male adversaries. Given the contexts of the two poems, it is more than probable that their original audiences may have found not simply echoes but direct references to confrontations with Scandinavian raids of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries in the monstrous representations of the women's antagonists. This article discusses the reasons women heroines proved narratively effective in confronting heathen enemies and argues that these poems acted therapeutically, offering a much-needed morale boost to the clerical and upper-class audiences of the poems.
More than a century after its end, the First World War continues to loom large in cultural memory, particularly in contemporary fiction in the United Kingdom but also elsewhere. However, both commemorative practice and literary representation remain overwhelmingly dominated by a narrowly conceived narrative of the war as fought by white, middle-class men on the Western Front. This article explores the role played by ephemera - defined broadly as any small, portable items and print materials that are not books - in shaping contemporary commemorative discourse and historical fiction about the First World War. It proposes that paying attention to the ephemera that inform writing about the First World War offers a valuable tool to understand and critique the limitations and opportunities of literary contributions to the war's legacy in the present.
In 1959, a Chinese translation of Robinson Crusoe was included in the Party-sponsored Masterpieces of Foreign Classical Literature series. The choice, however, is unexpected, given the novel's glorification of the capitalist ethos, which would seem to contradict the communist ideology of Mao's regime. This article examines the socio-political motivations behind the canonisation of this English novel in Maoist China. Robinson Crusoe 's Maoist canonisation was premised on Chinese critics’ interpretive manipulation of it. What would have been seen as the prototype of the capitalist New Man was recast as a role model for the communist New Man. Robinson Crusoe may have been selected for its relevance to Mao's utopian project. The primary reason for its canonisation was its consonance with the Maoist spirit of asceticism that was considered necessary for the realisation of a communist society. Its circulation can be seen as part of a propaganda push to back the Communist Party's New Man project and the Great Leap Forward movement. In investigating the use of Robinson Crusoe in Maoist China, this study demonstrates how an eighteenth-century English novel could take on new significance in a new cultural context and helps redress the dominant tradition of Orientalist readings of Defoe.
This article examines a historically unique text, the first novel by former British spy chief Stella Rimington. Published after 9/11 but before the London bombings of 2005, At Risk describes a new and as-yet unquantified threat, home-grown jihadi terrorism. Rimington was Director General of MI5 at a time of profound change, fighting hard to re-sell it as an agency committed to the doctrine of security-in-democracy. By the time the novel was published in 2004, however, counter-terrorism and the policies and practices surrounding the US ‘War on Terror’ had become an immensely contentious area. How possible is it to address the threat of home-grown extremism, the novel asks, while continuing to respect the human and legal rights of terror suspects? In 2004 there had never been a successful jihadi terrorist attack on British soil. The novel attempts to foresee the path that such an attack might follow and also to delineate two possible models of the would-be jihadi terrorist. At the time she was writing, we now know, actual terrorist plans were also being developed that would lead to the devastating London bombings of 2005. The essay compares Rimington's imagined scenario with the events she sought to anticipate, offering a rare insight into the thought process of Britain's most successful woman spy.
Money in the Bank was written by P. G. Wodehouse, while he was interned by the Germans in a civilian internment camp. Most critics see little in the novel that reflects its composition history. This article shows that view to be mistaken. Not only does Money in the Bank reflect upon camp life through historical allusions to treason and its focus on food, the critical view that Wodehouse was unmoved by his wartime experience creates a certain view of wartime Wodehouse that excuses him of any responsibility for his potential collaboration with the Germans.
