Culture in Camouflage War, Empire, and Modern British Literature

by Deer, Patrick

• ISBN13: 9780199239887
• ISBN10: 0199239886
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-06-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 andtemporalities 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 anenormously 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 technologiesof 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 formationsduring 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 theiroversight 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 bemobilized 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 andmovement. This was the struggle that British World War Two writers confronted with extraordinary courage and creativity.

Author Biography

Patrick Deer teaches in the English Department at New York University. His teaching interests include 20th-century British literature, war culture, modernism, postcolonial literature and theory, Anglophone literature, cultural studies, the novel and film, critical theory, and gender studies. He is Guest Editor of The Ends of War, a Special Issue of Social Text 91 (2007) vol. 25.2., and Co-Editor, with Gyan Prakash and Ella Shohat, of Reflections on the Work of Edward Said: Special Issue, Social Text 87 (2006) vol. 24.2. His published work also includes, 'The Dogs of War: Myths of British Anti-Americanism', in AntiAmericanism, edited by Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross (New York University Press, 2004), and 'Defusing the English Patient', an essay on the film adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel commissioned for A Companion to Literature and Film, edited Robert Stam (Basil Blackwell, 2004).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
War culture and war literature	p. 4
The Second World War culture boom	p. 9
From the Panorama of Battle to the Labyrinth of Total War: British War Culture, 1914-1929	p. 15
'I used to be able to visualize things': the Great War and modern vision	p. 15
Recapturing the oversight of war	p. 19
'Forever England': war poetry and deathly vision	p. 25
'Thoughts by England given': war correspondents and propaganda	p. 32
Modernism in camouflage	p. 43
Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and the recovery of strategic vision	p. 50
The Empire of the Air: British Air Power and the Second World War	p. 61
The air war and modern memory	p. 61
From Lawrence of Arabia to Aircraftsman Ross: air power's imperial romance	p. 64
The pleasures and terrors of the 'air-minded'	p. 73
'The Bombers alone provide the means to victory': the triumph of the aerial view of battle	p. 80
From The Aerodrome to 'Airstrip One': Rex Warner and the empire of the air	p. 84
Virginia Woolf's 'Thoughts on Peace' in an Air Raid	p. 91
Aces and air marshalls: the air war in the eyes of its participants	p. 96
Culture in the Blackout: Living through the Blitz, 1940-4	p. 106
Blackouts on the Imperial Home Front	p. 106
'Taking it' on the Home Front: Humphrey Jennings' imaginary war	p. 112
Propaganda, Surveillance, and Secrecy	p. 119
'More like a film': Henry Green's visions of the Blitz	p. 123
Listen to Britain: radio oracles of the people's war	p. 132
'Play unknown, actors unseen': James Hanley's No Directions	p. 141
Ghosts inside the 'Island Fortress': Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Haunting of the Home Front	p. 151
The haunting of the Home Front	p. 151
'At Home' in the Blitz: Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear	p. 155
'I cannot paint or photograph like this': Elizabeth Bowen's 'savage warnings'	p. 168
'Songs my father taught me': exhuming Deep England	p. 173
'It will have no literature': Ireland, spying, and surveillance	p. 180
The 'saving hallucination': confronting the ghosts of war	p. 186
'Simplify Me When I'm Dead': The Battle over Memory and National Culture	p. 192
'When in a year collapse particular memories'	p. 192
'No letters please': the uses of poetry	p. 195
'Why not war writers?': the blackout within the war machine	p. 200
'Literature is common ground': Virginia Woolf outside the leaning tower	p. 201
New puritans and word controllers: George Orwell's culture wars	p. 211
Total Waugh: dandies and queer aesthetes on the Home Front	p. 218
'Outside your own field of vision': Alexander Baron and the radical view of battle	p. 224
Conclusion: The Boom Ends: The War on British literature of the 1940s	p. 235
Notes	p. 243
Bibliography	p. 289
Index	p. 313
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