‘It’s in the Blood,isn’t it?’ The Contested Status of First World War Veterans in Second World War Civil Defence

This article examines how ex-servicemen’s memories of the First World War shaped their experience of working in civil defence during the Second. In response to ongoing public criticism of civil defence as a whole and a dismissive attitude towards veterans in particular, these men expressed a distinct form of ‘useful masculinity’, rooted in their combat experience and developed within the particular context of civil defence. I will argue that through the group setting in which remembering took place, veterans were able to oppose dominant cultural narratives and to develop and express these alternative narratives about their value.     

‘Read for Victory’: Public Libraries and Book Reading in a British Naval Port City during the Second World War

In 1942, a library official in Portsmouth, UK appealed to the city’s inhabitants to ‘read for victory’, believing that they had a duty to use their reading time productively as part of their wartime activities. This article argues that long-standing desires among the country’s political and civic elites to encourage the nation’s readers to spend their leisure time prudently intensified during the Second World War. The public library service was utilised by civic leaders, library officials and publishing trade personnel to aid the country’s war effort. The article argues that negative attitudes regarding mass reading tastes remained largely static, despite recognition that the conflict drew people to the written word for relaxation and escapism. Using the naval city of Portsmouth as a case study, this article charts the activities of the city’s public library authorities and the borrowing habits of its readers to reveal that while many people borrowed books in order to distract themselves from the conflict, the city’s strategic importance ensured that many citizens also read in order to facilitate their preparedness for war service, whether that be on the home front or overseas. The article argues that while, in common with national trends, many of Portsmouth’s citizens used libraries to obtain books to help distract them from the war, many remained eager to make use of the service for educational purposes, unlike the majority of the nation’s library users, whose interest in this aspect of library provision rapidly waned as the war progressed. The article concludes that the public library service was viewed as a central plank in the war effort and that library officials worked continuously to ensure that it remained so.     

The ‘Welsh’ Pimpernel: Richard Llewellyn and the Search for Authenticity in Second World War Britain

ABSTRACT

Achieving worldwide success in 1939 with his bestselling novel, How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn became indelibly linked with a particular vision of Wales and Welshness. Yet, when it posthumously emerged that Llewellyn was not Welsh but an Englishman of Welsh parentage he faced accusations of fakery. Mapping Llewellyn’s military service in the Welsh Guards and work with the BBC, this article traces his complex negotiation of selfhood during the Second World War. By highlighting how Llewellyn was embraced as a cultural representative of transnational Welshness, it underlines the potential of dual identifications in underpinning constructions of wartime Britishness.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

‘Such a Splendid Tale’: The Late Nineteenth-Century World of a Young Female Reader

There is little evidence for the impact of literature on young female readers in the late nineteenth century. Most studies focus upon the content of nineteenth-century books and magazines, highlighting female readers' acceptance or rejection of contemporary discourses on femininity and domesticity. This paper uses evidence from the unpublished diary of one young woman to emphasize the importance of reading as an activity in its familial and social, rather than literary and intellectual, context. We argue that some young women had access to books from a wide range of genres, but that reading was often relatively uncritical and apparent ‘messages' were not internalized. For many, the significance of reading lay in its flexibility, fitting easily into a domestic routine, and in the opportunities for privacy, independence and narrative absorption offered by the activity itself.     

‘A Million Little Bonds’: Infidelity,Divorce and the Emotional Worlds of Marriage in British Women’s Magazines of the 1930s

This article examines infidelity discourse within women's magazines of the 1930s. Marking a departure from existing studies that have explored representations of ideal marriage, it uses discussions of marital breakdown as a lens through which to consider conceptualisations of love within marriage. It demonstrates how, in the interwar period, notions of mutual emotional investment were used to reinforce marriages that were deemed to be in breakdown. Muddying the perceived binary between individuals and the institution of marriage, this research highlights how the latter could be bolstered, rather than challenged, by recourse to the emotional worlds of spouses.     

‘America’ as desire and violence: Americanization in postwar Japan and Asia during the Cold War

Abstract

Reflecting on a personal experience of ‘pre‐professional’ university education and reluctant engagement with Cultural Studies as an academic project, this article examines the now ambiguous role of undergraduate education under neo‐liberal management regimes. Arguing that a ‘new class politics in knowledge’ is emerging with the transnational policy‐sharing and international student exchange schemes with which diverse governmental cultures are responding to globalization, Morris suggests that the undergraduate classroom is becoming a ‘frontier’ of struggle over the future. Teaching cultural studies to undergraduates in a liberal arts environment is one way in which the discipline's emphasis on local knowledge can be put to institutionally creative uses.     

‘Bloomers’ and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950

The ‘bloomers’ are rarely considered beyond their 1851 origins in the United States and subsequent appearance in Britain. This article expands dress reform scholarship by analysing print culture elsewhere in the British world, specifically Australia and New Zealand. The colonial press manufactured controversy over this fashion – a perceived transgression of gender norms – even though antipodean women rarely sported the outfit. This article focuses on the dress reform lectures and writings of Amelia Bloomer, Caroline Dexter and Dr Mary Walker. While certain continuities resurfaced alongside the bloomer-like rational dress popularised in the bicycling culture of the 1890s, dress reform was largely deemed far less controversial by the turn of the twentieth century.     

‘The Charlatanry of the Learned’: On the Moral Economy of the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Germany

The notion of charlatanism is central to the social workings of the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Starting with Johann Burkhard Mencke's famous treatise The Charlatanry of the Learned, this paper traces how accusations of academic and scientific misconduct put in terms of ‘charlatanry’ initially helped to produce the new species of the erudite ‘charlatan’. Facing a growing complexity of scientific culture, this new frame of meaning, structured by numerous examples of scientific misconduct, offered a way of mapping the world of learning. But besides its cognitive impacts, the discourse of charlatanry allowed the creation of symbolic boundaries, which determined decisions as to the affiliation or non-affiliation to this recently forming scientific community by separating honourable from dishonourable scientific personae. Speaking of charlatanry therefore always implied a social distinction as much as a scientific one. The discourses on charlatanry also mirror differentiations within the scientific field. At first dominated by a critique built on courteous or bourgeois values, the scientific field later developed its own criteria of appraisal, such as authorship, originality, transparency, etc. Attracting the attention of a growing public sphere, the explicit verbalization of claims which were not related to the value system of a republic of letters primarily concerned with the production and distribution of knowledge finally led to a more implicit moral economy of science.     

'I still remain one of the old Settlement boys': Cross-class Friendship in the First World War Letters of Cardiff University Settlement Lads’ Club

This article examines the letters sent from former members of Cardiff University Settlement Lads' Club to two settlement workers, Amy and Edward Lewis, during the First World War. It argues that affective relationships developed within the settlement house prior to the war were subsequently utilised by working-class soldiers in their imaginings of home and community. The letters are used not only to demonstrate the interpersonal relationships that developed between settlement workers and settlement attendees, but also more broadly how the university settlement movement's concept of cross-class friendship worked in practice.     

‘The Talke of the Towne’: News,Crime and the Public Sphere in Seventeenth-Century London

This article reconsiders ideas of the public sphere in the seventeenth century, by focusing on how public opinion is shaped by the movement of information between media and between receivers. It contends that the scholarly preoccupation with a public sphere viewed exclusively in terms of politics obscures the fact that contemporaries did not distinguish between politics and subjects such as crime in their newsgathering. Examining the case study of James Turner, a burglar in the 1660s who became a cause célèbre in London and beyond, this article shows how crime news were eagerly exchanged, informing discussions and constructing public opinion.     

‘Engineering for Boys’: Meccano and the Shaping of a Technical Vision of Boyhood in Twentieth-Century Britain

The construction toy Meccano was created in 1901 by Liverpudlian clerk Frank Hornby and reached its height of popularity during inter-war Britain. By focusing on the development of Meccano throughout the company’s publicity and within oral history testimony, this paper considers how the toy promoted engineering to shape a technical vision of boyhood. Hornby shaped this vision by building upon masculine ideals of self-improvement that were central to Samuel Smiles’ book Self-Help and Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts movement. This vision built upon a past of achievements in engineering, and with it Victorian values such as clean-mindedness and independence, to enable boys to prepare for a technological modern world. Hornby’s own career and influences also provided the model for boys to make a success of their lives through the later establishment of the Meccano Magazine (1916) and guilds (1919) to accompany the toy. Secondly, it shows how this vision has continued to endure through the use of Meccano as a scientific device and in memories of the toy.