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: Jacob’s Room is often categorized as a war novel, despite Virginia Woolf’s decision to excise the presence of the First World War from its pages. Jacob Flanders perishes in the trenches, yet the war is never named, leaving behind an empty rift in the text—a conscious choice that reflects Woolf’s political disavowal of violence. In the form of an abbreviated Künstlerroman, a novel charting the development of a young artist, Woolf chronicles Jacob’s journey from boyhood to manhood: his time at Cambridge, his steps towards artistic inclinations in London, and his appreciation of Italy and Greece during his time as a soldier in the Great War. This tale ends tragically, not with the development of a young artist, but the artist’s death during the war. I read Jacob’s early enculturation into masculinity: he has “been brought up in an illusion,” a phrase which shapes the novel’s form and prevents individuality of character. In crafting a careful indictment of martial masculinity, Woolf creates a modernist anti-war novel that not only questions what it means to depict war through a pacifist lens but that also challenges the form of the novel itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focused on the growth of Russophone poetry after the beginning of the second phase of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (the first phase started in 2014). There have been many poetic publications by both those who support the war (in Russia) and those who oppose the war and the political repression of the current Kremlin regime; authors of the latter kind can live in Russia and in other countries. Speaking of the anti-war poetry, I write of the convergence of two movements that previously used to exist separately: poetry addressed to the widest audience (poetry-1) and aimed at analyzing language and ideology and addressed to the audience aware of complex forms of postmodern culture (poetry-2). Today the authors of these movements are developing tools not only to counter militaristic propaganda, but also to question the cultural and social conventions of contemporary Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-war literature is a subset of peace literature. Peace is portrayed in both negative and positive ways. Positive peace is defined on the basis of the concept of moral cosmopolitanism, while negative peace is in contrast to the concept of war. Accordingly, the cosmopolitan stories represent the utopia and the anti-war stories represent the ruined city. The data of this research are picture books with anti-war stories of age groups B and C. This article was written using the analytical-descriptive method and based on the formalist approach to answer how common devices (common formal patterns) are in children's anti-war stories. The result of this research shows that anti-war stories are divided into three categories according to the dominant element of the story based on the part of the triple process of beginning, middle and end of the war: beginning-centered, middle-centered and end-centered. Each of these three categories is further divided into subcategories based on the devices they use. The acceptance of the emerging genre of anti-war literature and the lack of sufficient internal and external research on peace literature for children necessitates research. This article is the first to categorize children's anti-war literature using a formalist approach. Introduction Peace in children's literature is presented in two ways: positive and negative. Positive peace means cosmopolitanism and coexistence while respecting each other's differences. "Negative peace is the absence of violence or war" (Galtung, 1969). In this article, anti-war stories are not stories based on mild and minor violence (such as ridicule or rejection), but the content of anti-war stories is based on the display of extreme violence (such as large-scale wars) with collective and physical injuries. Indeed, such stories represent the beauty of peace by showing the ugliness of war. The novelty of the present study is that it analyzes anti-war stories in children's literature and introduces a new classification. The classification of the forthcoming article not only helps the researchers of comparative literature, but also opens a window to peace literature for the authors of children's literature. Background Although the anti-war literature in the world has received the attention of researchers; But whether in Iran or abroad, there is still a lack of peace research in the field of children's literature. "Journal of Peace Research" abbreviated as JPR is an interdisciplinary monthly magazine that has been publishing research related to peace since 1964 (especially articles related to the causes of violence and conflict solutions). Among the peace research books, we can mention War no more: three centuries of American antiwar and peace writing (2016, Rosenwald). The said book is a collection of articles, stories, songs, memories and speeches that convey the message of anti-war and peace. Chapter 7 of War and American Literature (2021, Rosenwald); With the title "About anti-war literature", this author has also discussed American anti-war literature. In Iran, unlike the literature of holy defense, not much research has been done on anti-war literature. "Exploring Anti- war stories in the holly defense literature" (J′afariyan, 2014) is one of the few researches that have been conducted in this field. The mentioned research deals with the types of characters, anxiety disorders, political-social criticisms and nostalgia in Iranian anti-war stories. Aims, significance, and questions Some people consider anti-war literature to be imported. According to them, this genre is the concern of pacifist writers from countries for whom war recalls the crimes of the World War or the 20-year war in Vietnam and the like. At the same time, Iranian writers associate war with defense against the aggression of the Baathist regime in Iraq and tend to write stable literature. What confirms the necessity of this research is the fact that while writers once praised stability due to an imposed war, some of them now no longer see proxy wars as an inevitable necessity. Therefore, whether right or wrong, anti-war literature has become part of the reality of this country's literature. The research questions are: 1- Corresponding to the three stages of the war process (beginning, middle and end), what are the types of children's anti-war stories in terms of the dominant element? 2- According to the formalist approach, in each of the above-mentioned types of stories, the foregrounding of the dominant element is based on what devices (formations)? 3- In children's anti-war stories, which devices are consistent with Baudrillard's simulation theory? Research Methodology The research method is analytical-descriptive, and the sample group is selected by the "purposive sampling" method. To complete the sample, the method of "data saturation" was used. Authored and translated books titled "Peace and Friendship" and one hundred and thirty-five picture and illustrated book titles for age groups "B" and "C" were collected from the Iranian publishing market through library research. Stories that had an explicit anti-war theme were separated from them. The sample size resulting from saturation consists of twenty-four works, which are cited below and in the final table of the article. This article's approach to studying children's anti-war stories is the formalist approach. The goal of formalism is to discover the form of the work. The key concepts of the formalist approach are: Form, devices, dominant element, foregrounding, defamiliarization. The war process has three parts "beginning, middle and end". Depending on which part of the threefold process of elemental war predominates, war stories are divided into three categories: initiation-oriented, middle-oriented, and ending-oriented. Each of these threefold categories is classified into sub-categories based on the devices and formalistic arrangements used in the work, and then a detailed tree diagram of each of the above threefold categories is displayed. Conclusion Considering the age conditions and the cognitive level of the children, the visual stories of age group "B" and "C" are very brief, single-core, and single-centered and do not have multiple focus. In other words, these stories explicitly convey only one message (no complex and multiple messages) by using highlighting. Therefore, the dominant element in these stories was clearly emphasized in a convergent manner through devices such as the title of the book, the naming of the characters, the phonetic and semantic forms of the descriptions and the images attached to the text. Based on which dominant element is formed by highlighting which part of the three stages of the war process, anti-war visual stories are divided into three categories: initiation-oriented, middle-oriented, and ending-oriented. In this context, this article, while presenting the devices related to each of the three types of dominant elements mentioned above, shows that despite the claims of some critics who consider the formalist approach to be a mechanical one and lacking a dynamic ability to critique and analyze contemporary literature, formalism, like any other approach, can still be effective in criticism and draw the patterns of similarities and formal differences of stories such as the anti-war stories in children's literature by relying on the dominant element and highlighting devices. References Galtung, Johan. (1969). Violence, Peace, and Peace Research. The Journal of Peace Research. 6(3). Pp: 167- 191. J′afariyan, A. (2014). Exploring Anti- war stories in the holly defense literature. MA degree in the Persian Language and Literature. Shahrekord University: Faculty of Literary and Humanities. [Supervisor: J. Safari & visor: E. Sadeghi] [in Persian]. Rosenwald, Lawrence. (2016). War no more: three centuries of American antiwar and peace writing. New Yurk: Liberary of America. (ISBN: ‎ 978-1598534733). Rosenwald, Lawrence. (2021). "On Anti-war Literature". In War and American Literature. Jennifer. Haytock (Ed.). United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Pp: 103- 118. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108654883.010).

The article offers literary criticism of Svetlana Alexievich's "The Unwomanly Face of War," emphasizing how Alexievich's portrayal of wartime experiences challenges traditional depictions of heroism and war's naturalness. Topics include the subversion of conventional war narratives, the portrayal of love as an anti-war sentiment, and the unique blending of factual and fictional elements in Alexievich's documentary prose.

The autobiographical novel East from the West discusses the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a nonsense in which a Serbian family experienced a fatal maelstrom. Mrkić’s anti-war perspective is focused on the destruction of the meaning of warfare in the capacity which literature encompasses which becomes the voice of ethics as a recognition between good and evil. The perspective from below, the view of the victim is affirmed, which is contrary to monumentalism, and also one of the fundamental features of the poetic testimony in the recent Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature. Regardless of the resistance to the perception of the war as a transhistorical realia, evil and crime are merely the universalities for the author, which encompass the entire history. One’s own misfortune is only a synecdochical point in an unbroken sequence of bloody traces of evil. Such an understanding is derived from Mrkić’s ethics that always starts from an individual who has a free will (If one is manipulated, it is not a justification, on the contrary!) and who is responsible for oneself.

The presence of Erasmian discourse in Luis Zapata's Carlo famoso (1566) has been both neglected and misinterpreted in literary scholarship. Previously understood as an expression of insubordination against the reign of Philip II, the poet's intertextual use of Erasmus is reconsidered in this article as political advice imbued with a didactic purpose. Through an exploration of Zapata's contributions to early modern debates on the formation of the Christian prince, imperial expansion and war, this study seeks to determine the intellectual and ideological profile of the poet and establish a more accurate link between his epic and the wider European political framework of the sixteenth century. In doing so, it aims to broaden the lens through which Carlo famoso has traditionally been read and shed new light on the politico-ethics of its author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on American and Canadian adherents to the anti-war counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Topics include climate change believed to be responsible for more frequent and larger forest fires, increasing desertification, uncertainty over crop yields, and shortages of drinkable water; and overwhelming with discourses about a fragile national and global economy.

Adrienne Thomas and Vera Brittain both contributed to the body of anti‐war literature during the interwar period that was dominated by male writers. A comparison of Thomas's novel Die Katrin wird Soldat (1930) and Brittain's Testament of Youth (1933) highlights that, over time, their perception of 'Heimat' becomes increasingly differentiated. Work in the hospitals alienated both authors from the institutions that shaped society ('Gesellschaft') in Germany and England and from women active at the 'home front'. Instead, wartime suffering as part of their own generation engenders a sense of community ('Gemeinschaft') with the soldiers that works across borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can the carnage of war inspire poetry, and how do writers make sense of the combat zone when they are plunged into the fog of war? Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (1929) remains, even after ninety years, a touchstone for writers caught in the paradox of creating art from injury, bloodshed, and loss. Remarque's anti‐war novel challenged fantasies about war as a process of purification and rejuvenation, but it also brought back (and regenerated, as it were) a soldier from the dead to tell his story. In a cascading series of crises ranging from the linguistic to the existential, Remarque's protagonist, Paul Bäumer, tries to tell a "true" war story by drawing on a new aesthetic register affiliated with the grotesque, one that values fragmentation and deformation in its representational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes A Midsummer Night's Dream as a case study for exploring Shakespeare's relationship to pacifism. We argue that this play, which uses a love potion to end conflict and to suggest parity across various competing spheres, taps into early modern discourses about peace as well our own contemporary anti-war discourses. We take inspiration from Bernie Boston's photograph "Flower Power" and Allen Ginsberg's essay that first articulated that notion as we imagine the play's faeries to be "flower children." The essay ultimately argues that Shakespeare's play, as well as its play-within-a-play, dramatize the power of love as an anti-war and pacifist force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Up until the introduction of conscription in 1916 when the conscientious objector became a significant figure in British wartime society, the responsibility of publicly opposing the war was seen to fall on the shoulders of women. Within this context, the most prominent socialist anti-war newspapers of the period, theHeraldand theLabour Leader, became conduits for anti-war women to formulate and express their opposition to the war. By examining women’s writing in these two newspapers, this article argues that gender was central to how anti-war women articulated their view on the conflict. However, gender, and specifically femininity, was invoked in competing and often contradictory ways, and women anti-war writers critically engaged with each other in their consideration of the relationship between women and peace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Allert de Lange-Archives in the International Institute for Social Studies, Amsterdam, keeps the papers of the former German department of the Amsterdam publishing house Allert de Lange (1933-1940). After the German occupation of the Netherlands, these documents came to Berlin and Moscow but returned finally incomplete via Potsdam to Amsterdam. The correspondence between the polish author Józef Wittlin and Walter Landauer, his editor in the German department of Allert de Lange, forms part of it and provides insights both into the genesis of the German translation of Wittlins famous war novel Sól ziemi which caused its worldwide success as well as into his friendship with Joseph Roth, who took care of it. Both is described on the basis of this correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The format of a short story rapidly developed in the second part of the 20th century, which was relatively influenced by the development and prevalence of media within the social cultural environment. The formation of the German short story (Kurzgeschichte') was influenced by the English-American 'short story', but the originality of it was dictated by the events of World War 2. Short stories are one of the newest genres in the German literature: both the content and format are innovative and corresponding to a particular situation. Two basic genre criteria exist within the theory of a short story: quantity (a small volume of text which is determined by the number of characters) and the expression of the content conciseness (quality criteria), which is referable to the German short story. As an inimitable genre, only characteristic of the German history and culture, short story reached its development peak in the early post-war literature. Thereof, a kind of hybrid-text within the German cultural space can be discussed, when analysing and investigating the genre specifics of this literary format. The goal of the present research article is to characterize the theoretical aspects of the German short story ('Kurzgeschichte') as a hybrid-text of the German literature, and to actualize its phenomenon, as the genre development was affected by the politically-cultural, historical and socio-economic situation in Germany. In the analysis of the short story and its sketch-kind of juxtaposition with other short text forms of epic, an oppositional time relation is marked - a moment and an eternity. The core of the short story is modelled by the personal experience of writers within the war scene context, the Intention - to reject the nationally-socialistic pseudo-realism and to reflect personal experiences. In the forefront a question regarding the meaning of a real contemporary life episode is raised, as the problem situations of short stories are being solved in a spacetime, which is both concrete and general at the same time. Contemporary, real and, at specific moments, crucial problems are actualized, as they affect the life of a simple, or, in other words, small human, and these problems are caused by political and general tension. Early short stories of the post-war literature are phenomenal testimonies, that hold a sharply critical reflection and evaluation of the past, instead of just statistical history facts. Therefore, these texts are a unique material for the historical discovery, and this material captures the reassessment of values, profound philosophy, the human's existential ground in the spacetime - all of that is included in the instantaneous fixation of events, but is topical in an uncertain distance of spacetime - a borderless time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the lens of the Global War on Terror Mark Twain reemerges as an ideal American antiwar icon, and although his most scathing indictment of war fervor, "The War Prayer" (1905), was published posthumously, the text now bolsters the antiwar movement as seen on the Internet, in social media, and in independent films that demonstrate effective political appropriation of Twain's work. These include Markos Kounalakis's animated short (2006), the Lyceum Films adaptation (2007), and the Blasko Films production (2003). While there is a clear historical context for "The War Prayer," as Jim Zwick explained, there is a lack of historical specificity within the text that readily permits adaptation to other moments of fervid, religious patriotism in the name of war. More than mere dramatization, the article emphasizes aesthetic choices and Judith Yaross Lee's visual vernacular, particularly in Kounalakis's animation. The appropriation of Twain's cultural authority in these films has cemented his "legacy of dissent." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on analysis of the "War against War!" book by Ernst Friedrich along with "The Horror of It" book written by Frederick A. Barber as an anti-war publications. Topics discussed include consideration of grotesque concept by Barber along with Friedrich in the books for horror depiction; representation of victimhood conditions in the book by Friedrich; and presentation of dead children and starved corpses through photographs in the books.

Widely regarded as Anouilh's first mature play and first critical success, Le voyageur sans bagage features Gaston, a World War I amnesia victim who, after almost two decades in an asylum, is pressured by a philanthropic Duchess to find his family. She escorts him to the family she prefers, whose missing member was an unsavoury character bearing no resemblance to the person Gaston believes himself to be. The plot centres on Gaston's struggles to come to terms with a past that horrifies him. The play has garnered little scholarly attention; the few existing studies look broadly at Anouilh's generic categories, the play's antiwar theme, or its final plot twist. What has not been explored is an element informing the play at every turn: mirroring or dédoublement. This article shows how the myriad instances of mirroring or doubling highlight the duality inherent in Anouilh's protagonist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution dwells on Jewish aspects in Alfred Döblin's novel »Wallenstein«, which was written between 1916 and 1920. It refers, on the one hand, to the close financial connection between the Prague merchant and »court Jew« Jacob Bassevi and Wallenstein and the novel's real protagonist, Emperor Ferdinand II, and, on the other hand, to a scene that stretches over several pages, depicting in a hyper-naturalistic manner the torture and burning of a Jewish couple. Similar to the witch trials, the scene documents the total cultural decline at the time of the Thirty Years' War. Döblin's historical novel is also a plea against the barbarism of World War I and against wars in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The homosexual orientation of three major characters in Pat Barker’sThe Regeneration Trilogystrengthens their mistrust for the prevailing rationale of the war. Ultimately, the antiwar stance of the trilogy’s societally alienated, sexually transgressive characters is undermined by their return to combat. The motif of a single, enucleated eyeball links to the text’s powerful theme of observation. The absolutely detached, impossible vision of an enucleated eye is required if the acknowledged futility of war is to have practical value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of the article is directly linked to the culturally historical discourse of Wolfgang Borchert's short story "Generation without Farewell". The author's aim is to actualize the German post-war culturally historical and social prose codes within the context of text analysis, in order to reveal the impact of the National Socialism ideology on undeveloped personalities, carrying out political goals. Even though, just like any other literary work, the post-war short stories are fictional, the material accumulated in the 'text memory' lets the reader reconstruct the space-time of the national-socialist regime, and to decode the individual war experience of the writer in a wider socially-political context. This paper analyzes the nationally-socialist ideology and the impact of war on the personality development. National-socialist pedagogical concept is to withdraw children from the family environment at an early age and inject the Nazi ideology to young people, to nurture in them a collective sense of belonging, and the thought that only the collective communion is powerful, but the individual's struggle is doomed. The modelling of the future generation was gradual, and the ideology was injected and strengthened in every sphere of the society, especially in education institutions that helped with creating a loyal and amenable individual for the dominant authority, this person lacking any personal views and freedom of action. Vivid examples of this are Heinrich Boll's (1917-1985) "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We..." ("Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa...", 1950), "Business is Business" ("Geschāft ist Geschāft, 1950), "Pale Anna" ("Die blasse Anna", 1953) and Wolfgang Borchert's (1921-1947) "On this Tuesday" ("An diesem Dienstag", 1947), "Along the Long, Long Road" ("Die lange, lange Straāe lang", 1947). The research aims at answering the post-war questions: How could a human so blindly rely on nationally-socialist politics? Why did the older generation 'give up' their sons to war machinery? A generation without home, god, or love - that is how the new generation calls itself, a generation whose life experience is war asperity. Anti-war literature is one of the most powerful forms of human confrontation. The early short stories of West-Germany are used in the research (1945-1953). Scientific insights of Paul Ricceur (1913-2005), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Yuri Lotman ((Юрий Лотман, 1922-1993), Rafael Seligmann (1947) form the theoretical basis of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Dan Miron's concept of 'literary contiguity,' this article arranges an encounter between two documentary novels about the experience of the First World War, both told from the perspective of a Jewish officer. Although rather different with regard to their place in the Modern Hebrew canon, the well-known novel The Great Madness (1929) by Avigdor Hameiri and the unknown novel Gold in the Streets (1946) by M. Y. Ben-Gavriêl reveal numerous topical and aesthetic intersections when read alongside each other. The joint analysis shows that besides their pacifism and general criticism of the logic of the nation-state, both novels share a common geographical and ideological trajectory. Their interpretation of the events depicted during the 'Great War' envisages the Land of Israel as the ultimate destination of their protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 1915 Freud wrote one of his most beautiful, albeit extremely short, texts: 'On Transience'. This text, consisting of a dialogue between Freud and a poet whom we now know was Rilke, is a rumination on the meaning and implications of transience in our life: does transience rob life of its value and meaning, or does it add to that value? In this article I explore the reflection on the passing of time that 'On Transience' suggests: how the passing of time interacts with our attribution of meaningfulness and shapes our approach to life. The article also deals with the tension between repetitiveness and the uniqueness or specificity of objects within time, and explores the question of the persistence of value, especially literary value, in the face of time and transience, and the link between death and literary creation. Finally, the article refers to the immediate historical context of this reflection on the ephemeral, namely the destruction brought about by war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the millions of casualties of World War I, there were hundreds of poets, some of them quite well known when they enlisted, while others only found -- and tragically lost -- their literary voices during the war. It is the latter group of poets who are often regarded as 'War Poets' proper -- War Poets, moreover, whose poems appear to express distinctly anti-war attitudes. Two of the most famous literary casualties of 1915 were Rupert Brooke and August Stramm. This article will discuss some of their war poems and will use these poems to illustrate the enormous formal and thematic range war poetry can, and does, cover. In the process, it will also suggest that recent comparative approaches to British and French World War I poetry, and to the presence or otherwise of an identifiable group of War Poets in national literatures, should be extended so as to include German examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the rhetorics of memory and the cultural memorial functions of selected fictional historical narratives by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian best-selling author in exile. The analysis, based on the concepts of narratology of cultural memory (E. Erll), shows that Zweig's fictional historical narratives from the 1920's and 1930's contain a variety of memorial rhetorics. In the anti-war narratives, experiential modality prevails, in Stenstunden der Menscheit and in biographical narratives like Joseph Fouché and Maria Stuart that of anthagonism. Most significant in S. Zweig's historical fiction is the narrative inscription of alternatives and opposites in cultural memories and critical reflection on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2003, a contemporary version of the Greek playLysistratawas performed on over 1000 stages across the globe to protest the war in Iraq. This article analyzes the synchronized performances ofLysistratain order to question the role of the lived body in social activism. The lived body, as conceptualized by Young (2005), considers the power and constraint we experience as the material facts of our bodies – skeleton and organs, ligaments and tendons, muscles and fat – move and exist in a particular time in history, a particular geographic space, surrounded by particular other people who are co-constructing ways of being in the world together. In the past several decades, numerous public examples have emerged of women in particular creatively constructing themselves in relation to their given socio-historical conditions. This article engages in a two-part analysis, of a ‘productive misreading’ of Aristophanes'Lysistrataand of the synchronized performance-protests orchestrated by the Lysistrata Project, in order to better understand the ways in which gendered bodies are enabled and constrained by their physical and social environments in performing dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the criticisms levied at World War I news reports by Austrian poet Karl Kraus. Kraus's allegations of misrepresentation among members of the mass media as well as war poetry and war literature are described, examples are offered of Kraus' aestheticization of war violence, and the relationship between war and language in Kraus' book "Die letzten Tage der Menschheit" is examined.

This essay calls for a re-evaluation of the image of Dikaiopolis as a selfish, hedonistic figure who stands in sharp contrast to the figures of Trygaios and Lysistrata. Underneath the veneer of self-centeredness and self-indulgence — which is enacted by Aristophanes in the interest of antiwar rhetoric — lies a figure who cares deeply for the well-being of agricultural land and the female-dominated fertility rites of Attica. In support of this argument I offer (a) an attentive re-reading of the Megarian scene (730-835) which features the bartering of two girls disguised as sacrificial piglets for the Mysteries, and (b) an equally close examination of the figure of Amphitheos. In the case of the former this entails focusing on the allusions being made to Demeter's agricultural fertility rituals such as the ritualistic megara (pits) with regard to the Thesmophoria festival, and the figure of Diocles (774) with regard to the Eleusinian Mysteries. In the case of the later this entails an analysis of his genealogy as it relates to Demeter's religious rites and Attica’s ancestral founders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the formation of the League of Nations Union (LNU) as a reminder of those who have resisted war in the past and for those who seek to do so in 2015. Emphasis is placed on the Victorian branch of the LNU which played a leadership role in the Australian peace movement after the LNU's formation in 1921 until the onset of WWII. The LNU has been a neglected area of research and is often dismissed as irrelevant since its existence was attached to the failures of the League of Nations, a world body instituted at the end of WWI to prevent future wars. During WWII, a handful of members remained faithful to LNU principles and goals until its dissolution and conversion into its successor, the United Nations Association of Australia (UNAA). This article seeks to shed some light on the LNU's general legacy to peacemaking in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses U.S. novelist Norman Mailer's "Armies of the Night" as a very good book for setting the stage for contemporary literature. Topics covered include Mailer's steadfastly anti-war stance, the concise psychoanalysis of the U.S. war machine as depicted in Mailer's twenty-first century work, and Mailer's book entitled "Why Are We at War?"

The Good Soldier Švejk is often seen as an anti-war book satirising militarism. It is not. It is a consistent piece of fierce and ribald mockery of all those nations and bureaucratic institutions who had stood in the way of Czech nationalism and independence. By chance the Poles happened to be one of these nations. For Hašek and many of his Czech contemporaries the Poles were the very antithesis of the Czechs. During World War I nationally-conscious Czechs hoped that the Orthodox Russians would rescue them from oppression by the Roman Catholic Austrians; the intensely Catholic Poles hoped for exactly the opposite. The Poles revered their aristocrats and their Church whilst the Czechs were egalitarian individualists, a tradition which Masaryk saw as Hussite in its origins. Czech identity was born in those proto-Protestant times and crushed by the Catholic Hapsburgs as part of the Counter-Reformation. This is one reason why there is such savage mockery of individual Poles as soldiers, aristocrats and priests in Hašek's work. The Poles stood for hierarchical forms of social order that Hašek, an anarchic Czech nationalist, detested and which he attacked with an often obscene and scatological humour, particularly the Roman Catholic Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nathan Alterman's poem 'Don't You Give Them Guns' echoed European post-World War I anti-war literature. Curiously, the poem turned into a key text in a ritual instituted by members of the elite Jewish underground fighting force, the Palmach, which was established during World War II. This article is an attempt to understand how a pacifist poem came to be used by Jewish-Israeli soldiers at the heart of the 1948 War of Independence. In terms of theory, the analysis dwells on the relations between text and social context, arguing that alternative social ideas conceal themselves in poetry and other literary forms. These texts can be likened to undercurrents that preserve hidden social concerns. To follow the changing role of such texts, the article considers the fate of 'Don't You Give Them Guns' from its birth in 1934 to its later manifestations in the early twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented of several works of literature, including the book "All Quiet on the Western Front," by Erich Maria Remarque, the poem "Waking Early Sunday Morning," by Robert Lowell and the book "Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!)," by Bertha von Suttner. Particular focus is given to critiquing Western antiwar literature.

A criticism of the play "Masks or Souls?" by Halide Edib is presented. It gives evidence to prove that Edib is a pacifist and an anti-colonialist, contesting his local reputation as a nationalist which he has gained from other works. It gives a comprehensive analysis of the play. It also argues that Edib's works should be considered for the study of anti-war literature.

An essay is presented on the leftist post-war Japanese history book "Shōwashi," by Tōyama Shigeki, Fujiwara Akira, and Imai Seiichi. It says that the book uncovers the meaning of war in the analytical framework of Marxist and urges an anti-war message, which appealed readers in early post-war Japan. It discusses the production of the book including the idea for its publication, authorship, and selection for its title. It explores the issue it raised for being a history book.

Histories of the First World War have regularly implicated children's literature in boys' eagerness to enlist in the first two years of that conflict. While undoubtedly the majority of children's books, comics and magazines did espouse nationalistic, jingoistic and martial attitudes, there were alternative stories and environments. Looking at the publications, organisations and educational establishments that opposed the war and resisted the Germanophobia that began to dominate public discourse at the start of the twentieth century casts new light on some of the challenges and dilemmas facing a proportion of boys as they decided whether or not to join up. Additionally, the fact that there were alternative discourses is a reminder that not all readers would have responded in the same way to the same texts. Three areas are considered: children's stories and pamphlets produced by Quakers and peace societies; left-wing publications, especially those associated with Socialist Sunday Schools; and two of the first progressive schools in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ideological ramifications of using the theme of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a comic strip. The strip in question is Doonesbury, specifically a story involving the war in Iraq, and the entry-point for talking about ideology is an endorsement written for one of the Doonesbury reprint books by a prominent Republican politician. The essay's twin questions are: what does it mean for an anti-war strip to focus on PTSD (what ideological work is it doing), and, by extension, what are the implications of the apparent ‘commonsenseness’ of our understanding of the PTSD category? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the representations of war experiences in the books "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "The Sirens of Titan," by Kurt Vonnegut. The author examines how Vonnegut used fictionalization and humor to express his own war experiences, argues that both books represent allegories of World War II, and discusses underlying themes of anti-war sentiments.

T.H. White's The Once and Future King contradicts its author's intentions as an anti-war novel. Instead, examination of the book via the scientific method reveals that White was searching for an antidote for war, not presenting one. Read this way, his findings arguably offer greater 'real- life' lessons. (JPL) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the case study of the 2004 revisions of The Frogs, written originally by Aristophanes in 405 B.C., freely adapted by Nathan Lane, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. It focuses on Dionysus, performed by Nathan Lane, who was depicted as purportedly inoffensive and hyper-heterosexual, in contrast to Lane's own public persona as an openly gay man. It explains how Lane aimed the musical to drive an anti-war political message after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.