Wars in common: David Jones, John Ball and representations of collective experience in First World War writing

Simon Featherstone

doi:10.5817/BSE2021-1-8

Wars in common: David Jones, John Ball and representations of collective experience in First World War writing

Vol.47,No.1(2021)

Simon Featherstone

https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2021-1-8

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/144298

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Abstract

Since its first appearance, David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937) has been an exceptionalised text, its distinctive formal experiments and cultural reference points and its belated publication date serving to distinguish it from a canon of First World War writing shaped in the previous decade. By reference to Jones's self-identification as a "private soldier, in and out of the war," this essay emphasizes instead its links to a contemporary sub-genre of war writing that represented non-commissioned viewpoints exemplified here by Frederic Manning's novel Her Privates We (1930) and the war essays of R. H. Tawney. Tawney's work also suggests a shared relationship with the legacies of William Morris whose A Dream of John Ball (1886) provides a specific reference point for his collection of war essays The Attack (1953) and for In Parenthesis, an indication of the importance to Jones's writing of an English tradition of radical political and cultural thinking.

Keywords:
First World War writing; David Jones; In Parenthesis; Frederic Manning; R. H. Tawney

Pages:
145–156

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