Literature & History

The Franco-Prussian War was not only a watershed in the history of Europe, it also inspired a watershed moment in French literary history: the publication of Les Soirées de Médan in 1880. The short story collection was a central text in framing a Naturalist group identity, but each of its six stories is also a scathing attack on the Franco-Prussian War and on the catastrophic French defeat. It has been argued that the myth surrounding the volume quickly eclipsed the stories themselves, but the volume's publication history shows that some of the contributors wrote their stories before a collective volume was proposed, suggesting that the critique of the war was initially as important as forming literary allegiances. This article examines the book from both angles, as a literary-historical event and as an anti-war tract. The uncomfortable relationship between the two is underscored by the many paratextual and textual absences in Les Soirées de Médan, which simultaneously conceal and draw attention to the war. It will show that the critique of the war of 1870–1871 is a necessary aspect of the public fashioning of Naturalist group identity, but that this public position-taking complicates our understanding of Naturalism as a cohesive literary movement.

Underneath the historiographical disagreements about military honor and dueling in Imperial Germany there lurks a consensus that most duelists simply internalized the dictates of honor. This article troubles that presumption by attending to the Prussian-German military honor code’s mixed messages and impossible demands, which I interpret through Slavoj Žižek’s concept of a fantasmatic specter. After analyzing a variety of military texts, I illustrate the value of a psychoanalytic approach via a case study and re-examination of Theodor Fontane’s novel Effi Briest (1894/95).

During the First World War, trench newspapers regularly printed parodies of natural history, depicting servicemen as half-human, half-animal creatures. These parodies present a new angle on the role that trench newspapers played in articulating servicemen's senses of identity, in relation both to the experience of joining the military and to human identity in a time of war. Servicemen present themselves simultaneously as estranged war-zone beings and as expert guides to an exotic realm, negotiating complex tensions between alienation and communication, and offering alternative pictures of the war zone to those that have become most familiar. The parodies indicate the representational value of humorous modes for depicting nuanced aspects of servicemen's experiences of the First World War. In using humorous tropes that first arose in response to nineteenth-century scientific advances, in addition, the parodies suggest a new strand to the cultural history of the trench press.

This article examines the responses of Welsh poets, writing in both English and Welsh, to nuclear power in the period after the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986. Fall-out from Chernobyl contaminated upland areas of North Wales adjacent to the country's two nuclear power stations, Trawsfynydd and Wylfa, prompting a backlash against the nuclear industry. Welsh poets played key roles in the anti-nuclear movement during the 1980s and 1990s, writing poems that respond both to the Chernobyl disaster and to nuclear threats closer to home. Furthermore, we trace the long aftermath of Chernobyl in the poetry of R.S. Thomas and Robert Minhinnick, which is frequently contaminated with the imagery and vocabulary of nuclear disaster.