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Modernist poet H.D.'s experimental translation of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis (1916), published during WWI, shows H.D. pursuing this project to explore how wartime can provide opportunity for women to achieve extraordinary cultural authority in positions not generally afforded women, such as those of direct witness, storyteller and news-bringer, and heroic sacrificial victim. This translation project both registered and fostered the emergence of H.D.'s feminist queer thought about how 'New Women' of her time might come of age differently from women of generations past — through new narratives, new varieties of authority, and new forms of maturity. Finally, the essay complicates received ideas about H.D.'s 'pacifist' and critical stance on war, reading her translation choices as structured by an ambivalent fascination with both wartime 'beauty' and forms of advancement made distinctively possible for women by the circumstances of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Owen's rejection of Horace's dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as 'the old lie' prompts for me two questions: 1) Who exactly does Owen think lied? And is he justified in thinking this? 2) To what extent does Owen's rejection of Horace's words also amount to a critique of the classical tradition more generally, on the grounds that classical conceptions of war and heroism have proved utterly inadequate to the task of articulating the horrors of twentieth-century trench warfare? I argue that Owen's main target is a number of poets, including Jessie Pope and Henry Newbolt, who recruited sanitized receptions of the classics to exhort young men to lay down their lives for their country. However, it is not clear that any of these, or Horace himself, is actually lying. Owen as a keen student of Roman and Greek culture employed classical themes in various poems. Although classical literature offered rich and nuanced conceptions of warfare, its emphasis on the supererogatory and named individual heroes meant that new conceptions of heroism needed to be developed in World War I to cope with the conditions of often anonymous industrialized trench warfare, in which even doing one's duty could seem heroic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the sexual ideology of Finnish peacebuilding, the country's foreign policy brand and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda by examining the experiences of women 'written out of history'. Using the method of 'writing back' I juxtapose the construction of a gender-friendly global peacebuilder identity with experiences in Finland after the Lapland War (1944-45) and in post-conflict Aceh, Indonesia (1976-2005). Although being divided temporarily and geographically, these two contexts form an intimate part of the abjected and invisible part of the Finnish WPS agenda, revealing a number of colonial and violent overtones of postwar reconstruction: economic and political postwar dystopia of Skolt Sámi and neglect of Acehnese women's experiences in branding the peace settlement and its implementation as a success. Jointly they critique and challenge both the gender/women-friendly peacebuilder identity construction of Finland and locate the sexual ideology of WPS to that of political economy and post-conflict political, legal and economic reforms. The article illustrates how the Finnish foreign policy brand has constructed the country as a global problem-solver and peacemaker, drawing on the heteronormative myth of already achieved gender equality on the one hand and, on the other, tamed asexual female subjectivity: the 'good woman' as peacebuilder or victim of violence. By drawing attention to violent effects of the global WPS agenda demanding decolonialization, I suggest that the real success of the WPS agenda should be evaluated by those who have been 'written out'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an essay on the examination of the postwar proliferation of American writing, plays, films and other cultural productions in the book "Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961," by Christina Klein. Expansion of United States power in Asia; Emergence of tensions in the Cold War era; Exploration of how artistic productions served as cultural space for ideologies.

The author outlines the development of the Cambridge English literature course - the English Tripos -- from its origins at the time of the First World War down to the late 1960s, when The Cambridge Quarterly was founded. He describes those features of the course which make it a 'discipline', and argues that the large increase in the number of those wishing to study English at university level has made it difficult to sustain them. He suggests that the study of English literature might be better served in this country if it were offered not so much as a single honours course, but as part of a more general degree similar to those found in American liberal arts colleges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Max Plowman, the only member of the armed forces to be court-martialled for refusing to return to the Front in the 1914–19 War, has been oddly neglected. Consideration both of his case and of his Memoir, A Subaltern on the Somme, however, can illuminate the partly parallel case of Siegfried Sassoon, and lead to a reappraisal of the orthodox account of the literature of the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines the vexed history of the wartime poem card. Issuance of the poems found on U.S. World War II poem covers by government agencies and the military services; Suggestion that militant, pro-war poems began to disappear once the war settled into a futile stalemate of opposing trench systems punctuated by mass slaughter every time one side or the other attempted to break through its enemy's lines; Consideration of the poem card as the most unrecognized material form of poetry production and distribution.

From the viewpoint of twenty-first-century audiences it seems paradoxical that battle scenes are a recurrent feature of Elizabethan plays, since such demanding scenes could not be fully rendered on stage given physical limitations imposed by indoor and outdoor acting venues-of the late sixteenth century. Many anonymous messengers and heralds populating Elizabethan drama carried out the vital task of summarizing events that could not be presented on stage. However, the nonrealistic nature of battles becomes less surprising when we consider the aural and symbolic dimensions which were an integral part of the experience of theatergoing in early modern Great Britain.

The article focuses on identity, ambiguity, and critique in Mexican-American war narratives. Although the Mexican-American soldier-authors occupy very different positions in the emerging canons of Mexican-American, American, and world literatures, their war narratives nonetheless destabilize and pressure conventional notions of Mexican-American, and by extension, US American identity and culture. They collectively expose the conceits and contradictions inherent in a progress narrative and a resistance paradigm by illustrating how Mexican-American soldiers have occupied, and continue to occupy, complex social locations both inside and outside the geopoetic and geopolitical borders of the United States.

The article focuses on the literature of U.S.-Mexican war. Author George Lippard's two war novels are only part of a huge body of printed texts and visual images that circulated widely during the years of the US-Mexican War. The print revolution of the late 1830s and 1840s, which made it possible to reproduce and distribute newspapers and books at cheaper prices and in larger quantities than ever before, directly preceded the war. During the late 1840s, a remarkable series of stories and novels were quickly produced to capitalize on popular interest in events in Mexico.

The article discusses various literature that played a pivotal role in the most immediate cause of British intervention into the European conflict of 1914 , which resulted in the invasion of Belgium by Germans seeking a route to attack France. It states that the British, therefore, the war was construed as defense of the defenseless and as a response to German aggression It has been reported that in the case of official war artists, reciprocity of interests between government patronage and artist was based on an assumed freedom of expression, for cultural propaganda was not validated if it did not appear to be freely evolved and the work produced was not voluntarily developed by the artists concerned.

Introduces articles on the Vietnam War. U.S. history teachers' need to discuss the literature on the war; History students' attraction to the antiwar movement; Role of Vietnam War films in gauging American public opinion.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Helen E. Wicker on sermons, household books and general literature, one by Aaron Isaac Jackson on the relationship between J. R. R. Tolkien's pre-war experience in his writing, and one by Sam Perry on the poetry of Philip Larkin during his final year at St. John's College in Oxford.

The article presents a discussion related to war poetry. It has been pointed out that the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815 were as much a World War as the Great War of 1914-18, and they lasted more than five times as long, but they do not seem to have been a major influence on literature. Whereas the war poetry of 1914-18 is amongst the most important work in English literature, the verse collected in Betty T. Kemp's anthology "British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism: 1793-1815," is of a uniformly execrable standard of banality and ineptitude.