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Louis MacNeices Autumn Journal als Zeitzeugnis des Krisenherbstes 1938

  • Peter Krahé EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 9. September 2016
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Aus der Zeitschrift Anglia Band 134 Heft 3

Abstract

In the run-up to World War II, the Munich Crisis of 1938 highlights both the threat of war and the hope for a lasting peace. In his Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice, one of the outstanding English poets since the 1930s, reflects on personal memories and political developments against the wider background of the troubled interwar years. The poem captures a pivotal moment in 20th century history and its specific atmosphere, and it is noteworthy that MacNeice refused to amend it in the light of later events. The present analysis of Autumn Journal maintains that it is a poetical work with a personal approach to history, not a scholarly examination. First, it extracts from the poem a panoramic view of Britain’s social reality in the 1930s. The focus is then narrowed to passages of social criticism, presenting the disadvantaged in a period of growing affluence and technical progress: the unemployed, the homeless, and the neglected veterans of the Great War. The spirit of the times is elucidated in characteristic features and events: the speaker’s view of London, the retrospective of 1914 foreshadowing a new conflict, and home news like the famous Oxford bye-election. As Autumn Journal represents a contemporary testimony, a closer look is required at its non-literary sources, such as the mass media and their impact on everyday life. Finally, MacNeice’s projections and premonitions of historical events beyond 1938 are analysed in relation to the subsequent course of history.

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Online erschienen: 2016-9-9
Erschienen im Druck: 2016-9-1

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Overcoming Perpetual Estrangement in Persuasion’s Heterotopia
  4. Louis MacNeices Autumn Journal als Zeitzeugnis des Krisenherbstes 1938
  5. Tapestries of Contradiction: A Poststructural Analysis of Lessing’s Martha Quest
  6. ‘Waywardness’: J. M. Coetzee and the Ethos of Authenticity
  7. Return of the (non-)Native: Coming Home in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
  8. Losing One’s Illusions: Affective Sense-Making in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton and the Popular Media
  9. Spying in Gagool’s Cave: James Bond’s Colonial Adventures
  10. Reviews
  11. Donka Minkova. A Historical Phonology of English. Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language – Advanced. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, xv + 424 pp., £ 24.99 (pb)/£ 70.00 (hb).
  12. Maria Sutor. Non-native Speech in English Literature. Sprach- und Literatur-wissenschaften 51. München: Utz, 2015, x + 310 pp., 8 illustr., € 49.00.
  13. Sara M. Pons-Sanz. The Language of Early English Literature: From Cædmon to Milton. Perspectives on the English Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, xviii + 278 pp., £ 22.99.
  14. John D. Niles. The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, xvii + 425 pp., 55 figures, £ 60.00/€ 81.00.
  15. M. J. Toswell. The Anglo-Saxon Psalter. Medieval Church Studies 10. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014, xvi + 454 pp., 21 figures, € 100.00.
  16. Judith Kaup. The Old English Judith: A Study of Poetic Style, Theological Tradition, and Anglo-Saxon Christian Concepts. With a Foreword by Hugh Magennis. Lewiston, NY/Queenston, ON/Lampeter: Mellen, 2013, ix + 412 pp., $ 159.95 (hb)/$ 49.95 (pb).
  17. David Greer. Manuscript Inscriptions in Early English Printed Music. Music and Material Culture Series. Farnham/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015, xv + 206 pp., 36 figures, 8 tables, 84 music examples, £ 60.00.
  18. Christiane Maria Binder. From Innocence to Experience: (Re-)Constructions of Childhood in Victorian Women’s Autobiography. Schriftenreihe Literaturwissenschaft 90. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014, 412 pp., € 45.00.
  19. Stephan Karschay. Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, ix + 295 pp., £ 60.00.
  20. Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (eds.). The Modernist World. London: Routledge, 2015, 650 pp., € 125.95.
  21. J. Hillis Miller. Communities in Fiction. Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2015, xiii + 333 pp., 12 illustr., $ 30.00.
  22. Jeff Thoss. When Storyworlds Collide: Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics. Studies in Intermediality 7. Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2015, ix + 194 pp., 34 figures, € 55.00/$ 71.00.
  23. Ulf Schulenberg. Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, vii + 251 pp., € 83.19/$ 95.00.
  24. Kate Rigby. Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015, x + 225 pp., $ 24.50.
  25. Christine Marks. “I am because you are”: Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt. American Studies – A Monograph Series 244. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014, 234 pp., € 40.00.
  26. Books Received
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