Product Description

British Writing of the Second World War is the first study to provide a detailed critical and historical survey of British literary culture in wartime. Concerned as much with war as with writing, it explores the significance of cultural representations of violence to the administration of the war effort. A theoretical account of the symbolic practices which connect military violence to policy provides a framework for analysing imaginative and documentary literature in its relations both to propaganda and to Peoples War ideals of social reconstruction. The book evaluates wartime fictions and memoirs in the context of official and unofficial discourses about military aviation, the Blitz, campaigns in North Africa, war aims, the conscript Army and the Home Front, Prisoners of War, and the Holocaust. It uncovers the processes by which the meanings the war had for participants were produced, and provides an extensive bibliographical resource for future scholarship.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1609445 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Review
Anyone with a serious interest in the literary or cultural history of the Second World War would learn something from this book. (Modern Language Review )

Rawlinson perceives and exposes the way that war literature is never oppositional to dominant ideologies in any simple or straighforward way. (Modern Language Review )

This is the most authoritave study so far of the culture of the second world war. Mark Rawlinson's survey of poetry, fiction, autobiography, film and journalism is wide ranging as well as profoundly researched and theoretically alert ... Not the least of this book's virtues is its scrupulous reassessment of the concept of the people's war. (Rod Mengham, Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 April 2001 )

About the Author
Mark Rawlinson is Lecturer in English, University of Leicester