English

This article examines recent Romantic scholarship that has begun to explore the connections between British Romantic period writing and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Countering traditional views that writers were largely unconcerned with the events of these wars, such scholarship has argued that the wars had a significant impact on the writing of the period. Though some critics have viewed the period's writers as unquestioningly reproducing the wars as an exciting spectacle, others have drawn attention to the ways in which the meanings of war were contested through the period. Particularly central to these discussions has been the issue of suffering and the extent to which such suffering was either foregrounded or rhetorically elided from the public's view. The article concludes by looking at some of the most recent trends in this scholarship.

"Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war."

This article contributes to the study of Shakespeare's appropriation in Germany during the twentieth century, with a particular focus on its two authoritarian regimes: the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic. Germans have had their very own 'German' Shakespeare since the eighteenth century. Goethe and Schiller, among others, claimed the playwright for their projects of literary (and national) self-assertion. Ideologues in the Third Reich and the GDR conscripted this already 'naturalized' Shakespeare for the purposes of ideological education, and even hailed a new era in the appreciation of his work. Under the swastika, teachers were encouraged to study Shakespeare's Führerfiguren, as well as his anticipation of the racial concerns of National Socialism. In classrooms of the GDR, the emphasis shifted to Shakespeare's humanism and realism, from which, students learned, contemporary socialist literature had evolved. The plays were now read as critical and optimistic responses to a social and political reality defined by class struggle.

The 1970s and 80s have often been called a watershed moment in the revival of interest in Australia’s First World War. They saw a veritable war books boom: after a period of dearth in the 1950s and 60s, when writers as diverse as Katharine Susannah Prichard, Judah Waten, Martin Boyd, Leonard Mann struggled to find audiences for their war novels, the Great War now sold again, with many of the new boom’s products lasting well into the new millennium, not least because of a new, busy traffic between the nation’s book-market, and its TV and cinema screens.

The boom’s first book, Roger McDonald’s 1915 (1979) received huge publicity, which, as one reviewer put it, “ran the risk of overkill”. McDonald, like the other authors of the boom, had grown up with the commemorative ritual around the conflict, and found that, “with its sanctified heroes [it] had nothing to do with our lives in Australia.” This chapter
reconstructs the contexts of this new boom, and reads 1915 alongside other novels of the decade – David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter (1981), Gwen Kelly’s Always Afternoon (1981), and Geoff Page’s Benton’s Conviction (1985), alongside a series of adaptations from the screen, such as Jack Bennett’s Gallipoli (1981), Godfrey MacLeod’s Anzacs (1985) and Elyne Mitchell’s The Lighthorsemen (1987).