Literature & History

The nonsense rhymes that were almost ubiquitous in First World War trench newspapers (periodicals produced by servicemen while on active service) present vivid, humorous, and arresting representations of violence. This article draws attention to servicemen’s widespread use of limericks and parodic nursery rhymes to depict soldiers being, variously, shot, shelled, and bayoneted, and establishes the hitherto unrecognised representational significance of these poems. Those portrayals of the First World War most frequently celebrated for their truthfulness and emotiveness tend to be both solemn and, in different ways, ‘new’. In contrast, written in the traditions of nineteenth-century nonsense literature and reflecting the popularity of nonsense in contemporary comic periodicals, nonsensical trench newspaper poems indicate the durability of nonsense as a form of Great War representation.

During and after the First World War, authors in several of the main belligerent nations presented the war as a young man's war. The young man's war proved to be a powerful trope, and a myth emerged about the typical trench soldier as handsome, white, and eighteen. In this article, I examine literature about the Great War across several nations – primarily Germany, Great Britain, and France – to demonstrate how and why youth became embedded in the collective memory and representation of the war. I argue, in part, that notions of youth in the early twentieth century allowed participating nations to emphasise innocence and tragedy, claiming the moral high ground in the process. As a result, it is now difficult to accurately depict the First World War soldiers as fathers as well as sons, husbands as well as fiancés, men with careers as well as boys fresh from school. The generation of 1914 must be conceived more broadly, which would disallow easy teleologies to later tragic events in the 1930s.

A number of well-known poets and literary writers were drawn towards the ideas of the organic husbandry movement in the 1930s–50s, including T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry and H. J. Massingham. This article explores the literary influences in the seminal organic texts of the period and examines the important role which poetry played in the formulation of key organic concepts and the dissemination of the organic cause. It concludes that a consideration of literature and poetry should play a pivotal role in our understanding of the development of the organic movement.

If, as Peter Gatrell has suggested, the figure of the refugee was defined and even constructed during the twentieth century, then the Second World War was a crucial period in this process (Gatrell, 2013). This article looks at three representations of refugee figures from this period, Graham Greene's novel The Name of Action (1930), Rebecca West's short story ‘Around Us the Wail of Sirens’ (1941) and Storm Jameson's novel The Black Laurel (1947), evaluating them in light of recent scholarship around hospitality and asylum to suggest that these refugee characters subvert the norms and customs of British hospitality. It argues that in these three texts, refugees act as ‘threshold figures’, exposing the realities of war and the inadequacy of British social processes to contain them. In doing so, they point towards a different way of representing the refugee as an active agent, rather than a passive recipient in both political processes and social interactions.