Recent British War Fiction

Joint Session: Introduction

War and Narrative Writing

Tony Harrison, ”A Cold Coming” (1991)

• I saw the charred Iraqi lean towards me from the bomb-blasted screen

• His windscreen wiper like a pen ready to write down thoughts for men,

• His windscreen wiper like a quill he’s reaching for to make his will.• I saw the charred Iraqi lean like someone made of plasticine

• As though he’d stopped to ask the way and this is what I heard him say:

• ”Don’t be afraid I’ve picked on you for this exclusive interview

• Isn’t it your sort of poet’s task to find words for this frightening mask?

• […]

War and Writing

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854)

• Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward,All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred."Forward, the Light Brigade!"Charge for the guns!" he said:Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

William Simpson, The Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava

(1855)

Steven Berkoff

• Sink the Belgrano (1986)

Postwar British Fiction

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2

• Voices from World War I

• Voices from World War II

Postwar British Fiction

• Drew Milne, ”Drama in the Culture Industry: British Teatre after 1945.” In: Alan Sinfield and Alistair Davies, British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society 1945-1999 (2000).

• ”A selection of historic and dramatic events […] the shadow of the second world war […] the 1956 Suez fiasco […] the Vietnam War […] the Falklands war of 1982 […] the Gulf War”

Postwar British Fiction

• Alan Sinfield, ”Culture, Consensus and Difference: Angus Wilson to Alan Hollinghurst.” In: Alan Sinfield and Alistair Davies (eds.), British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society 1945-1999 (2000).

• ”An Argentinian man also adopts a threatening posture but proves ineffectual; I believe this is a joke about how Britain defeated the Argentinian attempt to seize the Falkland/Malvinas Islands in 1982.” (97)

Postwar British Fiction

• Kevin Foster, Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (1999)

• The Falklands War may seem a geographically and historically distant conflict today, but I believe […] that it represents a critical space – physical, mythic and narrative – in the shaping of contemporary Britain. The brash, self-confident nationalism of the late 1990s ’Cool Britannia’ is built on the bones of what happened in the South Atlantic in the spring of 1982 and how these events were mediated, experienced and understood back in the United Kingdom.” (2)

Postwar British Fiction