Author: Allan Hepburn Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP ISBN: 0773599037 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
Near the end of the Second World War, new ideas about citizenship, national identity, belonging, and rights emerged as the atrocities of the war – coupled with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – spurred writers and citizens around the world to think about their responsibilities to their fellow man. Covering British authors and contemporary fiction by migrant writers publishing at mid-century, as well as some photography from the era, Around 1945 is a collection of essays that reveals how literary texts and cultural events modeled human rights issues such as dignity, freedom, sovereignty, and responsibility. Unified by an investigation of the human and cultural aspects of universal rights, these essays show that British writers tested the parameters of citizenship and rights in novelistic form. By imagining duties and rights of citizens in hypothetical contexts, these novels expanded on the legislated entitlements and obligations that make up civic and human identity. To this day the repercussions of 1945 continue to unfold in stories about statehood, refugees, humanitarianism, displacement, and national belonging. At the same time, novels continue to imagine the human person, equal in rights and dignity before the law, yet often compromised by the political exigencies of nation-states that do not recognize legal, political, or human rights. Tracing the rippling consequences of the Second World War from 1945 through the Cold War and into the present, Around 1945 is an extraordinarily rich volume that will alter our perception of pre- and post-war British literature. Contributors include Nadine Attewell (McMaster), Mitchell C. Brown (Dalhousie), Matthew Hart (Columbia), Janice Ho (Colorado), Emily Hyde (Rowan), Peter Kalliney (Kentucky), Marina MacKay (Oxford), Melanie Micir (Washington, St. Louis), Adam Piette (Sheffield) Claire Seiler (Dickinson College), and Ian Whittington (Mississippi).
Author: Ian Buruma Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0143125974 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from the ruins of World War II Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s experience. A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.
Author: Allan Hepburn
Author: Ian Buruma
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