Culture in Camouflage aims to remap the history of British war
culture by insisting on the centrality and importance of the
literature of the Second World War. The book offers the first
comprehensive account of the emergence of modern war culture,
arguing that its exceptional forms and temporalities force us to
reappraise British cultural modernity. The book explores how
writers like Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, T.E.
Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, James
Hanley, Rex Warner, Alexander Baron, Keith Douglas, Henry Green,
and Graham Greene contested the dominant narratives of war
projected by an enormously powerful and persuasive mass media and
culture industry. Patrick Deer reads war literature as one element
in an expanded cultural field, which also includes popular culture
and mass communications, the productions of war planners and
military historians, projections of new technologies of violence,
the fantasies and theories of strategists, and the material culture
of total war. Modern war cultures, Deer contends, are defined by
their drive to normalize conflict and war-making, by their struggle
to colonize the entire wartime cultural field, and by their claim
to monopolize representations and interpretation of the conflict.
But the mobilization of cultural formations during wartime reveals,
at times glaringly, the constitutive contradictions at the heart of
modern ideas of culture. The Great War failed to produce a popular
war culture on the home front, producing instead an extraordinary
literature of protest, yet the strategists struggled to regain
their oversight over both the enemy across no man's land, and the
minds and bodies of their own mass conscript armies. The interwar
years saw a massive effort to make strategic fantasies a reality;
if the technology of imperial air power or mobile armoured warfare
did not yet exist, culture could be mobilized to shore up the
ramshackle war machine. During World War Two a fully fledged
British war culture emerged triumphant in time of national crisis,
offering the vision of a fully mobilized island fortress, a loyal
empire, and a modernized war machine ready to wage a futuristic war
of space and movement. This was the struggle that British World War
Two writers confronted with extraordinary courage and creativity.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
