scholarly journals The demotic tongue of mateship in Australian Great War literature: The vernacular humourist

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
Dominic P. G. Sheridan
Keyword(s):  
War Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Great War ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Great War

This paper looks at the demotic tongue of mateship in Australian Great War Literature as a theme of cognition and understanding in the literary texts and texts of culture. The language, like the Australian, was filled with character and a sense of the larrikin. It seemed irreverent at times, even rude in some circles, but it was much more than its immediate sound or inference; it was the natural verbal essence of the Australian mind – honest, loyal, dutiful and humorous. These characteristics are cornerstones of Australian mateship, a type of friendship that would be there beyond the bitter end, rival the love of a woman and even the protection of one’s own life. For some Australians, poetry was merely an extension of this language, as language was merely an extension of friendship. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the Australian use of humour and language in the setting of Great War poetry. It looks at the demotic tongue of mateship, specifically what is known as the Great Australian Adjective (bloody), along with several other examples of vernacular language, in Australian Great War Literature, and considers this by referring to the common language of the Australian poet from the time. It will consider the notion that Australian writers of the Great War era may have been misunderstood as a result of their language, leading to critical mistakes about a poem’s literary worth, a poet’s seriousness as a poet and a nation’s literary value.

The Expatriate Idyll

2018 ◽  
pp. 98-125
Author(s):  
William Cloonan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
War Literature ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
American Expatriates ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War

A critique of American expatriates, mostly veterans of World War I, who turn Europe into a vast American playground. The alleged justification of their behaviour is their traumatic experiences of the Great War which has been over for ten years at the start of the novel. Robert Cohn’s character contrasts with that of his fellow expatriates and sheds light on their affections and sterility. He also represents the condition of post-war literature, severely tried by the realities of the war, but slowly re-establishing its strength and ability to comment meaningfully on the contemporary world.

scholarly journals A United Voice

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dallin Higham
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
Historical Legacy ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Trench Warfare ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Rupert Brooke

In this article, I consider three influential poets of the Great War: Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Rupert Brooke. Since the birth of the modernist movement, the historical legacy of Great War poetry has tended to focus on the differing levels of “disenchantment” expressed in the works of these three poets when considered separately, applauding Sassoon and Sorley and criticizing Brooke. While I recognize a separation of the works of Brooke from those of Sorley and Sassoon in terms of modernist disillusionment, I argue that analysing instead the literary elements which unify the works of all three poets offers a comprehensive understanding of the experience of trench warfare experience, unavailable through traditional methods of evaluating Great War poetry.

The Hazards of History

2020 ◽  
pp. 187-217
Author(s):  
Gaetana Marrone
Keyword(s):  
Heterogeneous Group ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ordinary Experience ◽  
Physical Hazards ◽  
Self Mutilation ◽  
The Common ◽  
Return Home ◽  
The Great War

Uomini contro (Just Another War, 1970), one of Rosi’s most undervalued films, exposes the barbarity of war and the absurdity of military dogma by focusing on the plight of the common soldiers fighting in the trenches of the Great War, many of whom resorted to mutiny, desertion, and self-mutilation to resist being sent on suicide missions. Rosi’s obsession with the moral as well as the physical hazards of war finds new expression in La tregua (The Truce, 1997), adapted from Primo Levi’s memoir of his return home after Auschwitz. The film is stylistically notable for the eschewing of visual and theatrical effects and the concentration on the ordinary experience of a heterogeneous group of people, Jews and non-Jews alike, confronting the uncertainty of what awaited them as free beings. Claiming that he wanted “to turn Levi into an eye,” Rosi also aspires to the role of a timely witness.

‘Quite Ordinary Men and Women’: John O’london’s Weekly and the Meaning of Authorship

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Collier
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Great War ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Great War

John O’London’s Weekly saw its mission as bringing literature to a demos whose appetite for reading had increased significantly during the Great War. Its treatment of questions of literary value and canonicity evinces conflict about the nature of authorship and its own status as a popular, but not prestigious, print artifact. Addressing, in part, an audience of aspiring writers, the newspaper simultaneously posits writing as a craft that is learned and accessible through hard work and as a talent that one is born with; it depicts writing both as a means of making a living and as a sacred, inspired condition. The chapter examines the newspaper’s treatment of H.G. Wells—its avatar of the writer as the upwardly striving work-a-day writer—and Thomas Hardy—its representative of authorship as sacred calling. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the paper’s careful, equivocal treatments of an ascendant modernism in the late 1920s. The newspaper’s cheap, disposable materiality—it cost 2d weekly and was printed on thin, friable paper—underscored its difficulty in accruing any lasting cultural authority.

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