Long Shadows : The Second World War in British Fiction and Film
- Submitting institution
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The University of East Anglia
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 186178931
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Northwestern UP
- ISBN
- 978-0-8101-3329-7
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- May
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Long Shadows is the first volume to offer a critical corrective to the selective memory of WW2 in Britain through postwar literature and film. Its essays range across popular genres (romance, spy fiction, crime fiction, war film) as well as documentary film, literary fiction and life writing to demonstrate that a more diverse cultural archive of the war has always been available. Two of the core questions the collection poses, then, are how impactful cultural production is vis-à-vis popular beliefs and why contemporary British identity is still so reliant on a reductive rendition of the war.
What transpired through the work of established and junior scholars was how the emotional resonance and longevity of popular memory depended on the marginalisation of specific aspects of British wartime actions and experience, among them the traumas of children and prisoners of war, widespread social discontent, racism suffered by colonial combatants and Jewish citizens, collaboration with the enemy in occupied territory, and the bombing campaign.
The book is one of two edited collections emerging from an interdisciplinary conference co-organised with historians in Brighton and Strathclyde in 2011 which aimed at investigating the nature of British commemorative culture of WW2. As editor, I selected the papers and determined the topics, scope and parameters of the volume and shaped the research vision of the volume as a whole.
My introduction analyses the narrative pillars of British memory about WW2, explaining its resonance for the construction of national identity post-1945, and its political expediency until today despite historical analyses and cultural representations of diverse wartime experiences. My own essay is the first critical discussion, seventy years after the war, of the bombing of Germany in British literature and film.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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