This chapter demonstrates the extent of women's involvement in a theatre of the Second World War, the Battle of the Atlantic, which in the popular memory is an entirely masculine affair. As victims of the Battle of the Atlantic, women had a particularly high value in the propaganda war. The chapter shows the diversity of contemporary and life-writing texts produced for women, about women and by women in relation to their involvement in this particular theatre. The ENIGMA texts are usually marked by a continuing discretion and deference to the male on gender issues. The chapter also shows how concerns about national morale, a willingness to utilise existing stereotypes about gender, led to the production of strikingly similar narratives to explain the involvement of women in the war at sea.

The Anglo-Boer War was a complex tangle of conflicting interests in which Britain pursued economic and geopolitical benefits opposed by determined republican farmers. This chapter considers Cecil Y. Lang's terms 'cosmopolitan' and 'republican' in the light of recent critical theories of 'rooted cosmopolitanism' while revisiting the poet's change in perspective during the late years of his career. Songs of the Springtides, reasserts Algernon Charles Swinburne's treatment of the sea as origin and endpoint of life, an 'elemental voice' with 'elemental rhythms'. Peace conveyed by the sea's calm gives the amphibious singer-swimmer and his listeners access to a strange underwater seascape inaccessible in the storms of revolution. Swinburne was nonetheless capable of sustaining a negotiative ethics when meditating on radical philosophical and ontological difference. This capability is borne out by one of his last swimming poems, 'The Lake of Gaube', published only days before the outbreak of the South African war.

This chapter discusses Aldous Huxley's early novella 'Farcical History of Richard Greenow' as an example of non-combatant war fiction, and offers a reading and critique of this text which examine discourses of gender during the war period. While the fantastic form of 'Farcical History' is distinctive in Huxley's early writing, its central themes of division and self-division are anticipatory of his subsequent development up to and including Brave New World. In the 1920s, Huxley employed the genre of the novel of ideas to examine the disparate modes of intellectual, cultural and political division that were evident in the post-war period and the related modes of self-division that affected the individual. The leading literary voices of the 1920s were to be Huxley and Virginia Woolf, and her anonymous review of Limbo in the TLS is interesting reading.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book traces Algernon Charles Swinburne's responses to Matthew Arnold, focusing in particular on the young Swinburne's challenge to the older critic who was held as the foremost English authority on French literature and cosmopolitan culture. It concentrates on Swinburne's poetry, in particular on his use of images of open-air swimming as a 'ubiquitous in nineteenth-century poetic meditations on democratic reform'. The book argues for the importance of Swinburne's prose writings in our understanding of his overall achievement. It shows that a close analysis of metre and poetic form leads to a radical rethinking of how sexuality is encoded and expressed in Swinburne's poems. The book looks at Swinburne in intellectual dialogue with two of the major poets of his age: Christina Rossetti and Robert Browning.

In the Second World War, women were involved in undercover work but they were concentrated in particularly female-appropriate positions. This chapter is an exploration of textual accounts which narrate how femininities, which were strategic and empowering, could be mobilised and how the necessities of war impacted upon femininity. It explores testimonies that narrate the ways that female agents employed conventional forms of temporally specific attractiveness in order to assist passing. The private, domestic tasks traditionally performed by women offered female agents immunity and provided them with a cover for their clandestine work. The chapter discusses accounts that record the effectiveness of enactments of traditional feminine conduct. Some tasks were explicitly denied to women as a gendered division of labour was developed within the Special Operations Executive (SOE) with women being sent into France only as wireless operators and couriers.

This chapter examines series of linguistics-based concepts of literary forms, including the post-structuralist concepts of 'the text' and 'writing'. Roland Barthes has stepped through the graphic surface of the page into the conceptual space within text to examine linguistic signifiers and what they signify. The 'text' of structuralism is idealised text, intertextually limitless, whereas specific actual texts must be created and limited by their readers. Linguistics-based analysis routinely ignores the material aspect of any text, despite the fact that it is this materiality, the process of publication that gives the text its communicative power through distance and time and allows it to be discussed by critics. A positive awareness of the signifying power of writing led Derrida to write about a novel that utilised its graphic surface, Philippe Sollers's Numbers, and to write Glas.

After the Second World War, George Orwell looked back on the murder cases that had 'given the greatest amount of pleasure' to the British public. The Beatrice Annie Pace case fell just outside Britain's 'great period in murder', and since it ended in an acquittal it should perhaps not even be counted a 'murder' at all. The case's sensational quality in 1928 was a product of two broader factors during the 'great period in murder': an expanding sensationalist press and a declining acceptance of domestic violence. Opinions about accused killers often varied across the press spectrum, and they might, over time, shift as new information came to light. Although clear press preferences often emerged, it is often possible to find quite divergent views running parallel to one another: press unanimity of the sort found in the Pace case has probably been the exception rather than the rule.

William Willcox, who had provided so much forensic testimony in the Beatrice Annie Pace case, wrote a medical opinion for the court that depicted the novel as obscene and dangerous. Despite a conclusion to the Pace case that was, from the police perspective, distinctly unsatisfying, Chief Inspector George Cornish was officially 'highly commended' for 'ability in a difficult case of alleged murder'. After 1928, newspaper articles might list other cases in which Cornish was involved, but they tended to avoid mentioning his dogged efforts to convict Beatrice Pace. After the Pace trial, William Willcox remained active in the field of toxicology. By the end of the 1930s, Beatrice was living in Stroud, Gloucestershire, where she bought a semi-detached house in which she would spend the remainder of her life.

By the late 1930s Clemence Dane and Virginia Woolf were both well-established women writers, and well known as feminists. While Woolf's logic works with the connections between clothes and ideology, Dane links clothes to performance and theatre clothes and uniform, the stock-in-trade of performance, are central to the theatre of fascism. Dane's insight into the dressing rooms of 1930s' fascism is confirmed by subsequent historians. It was no accident that the birthplace of twentieth-century fascism was in the land of opera. Fascist black made its first appearance on the glamorous backs of the Arditi, a volunteer force of elite shock troops in the Italian Army during the Great War. The starring role in the theatre of fascism is played by the dictator himself. Dane's prescient appreciation of the theatre of fascism may have been assisted by the interpénétration of theatre and reality in her own life.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores notions of identity and gender through a close examination of Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle's relationship as the war impacted on it. It examines the intricate gender assumptions that surround the condition of 'shell shock' through a detailed exploration of the life and work of Vera Brittain. The book discusses the gendered attitudes to the First World War located within Aldous Huxley's novella 'Farcical History of Richard Greenow'. It also explores the questioning of war in the 1930s, a period when memories of the First World War remained fresh. The book also examines women performing very 'unfeminine' roles during the Battle of the Atlantic, and argues that femininity is imposed nonetheless for propagandist purposes. It illustrates the confusion often experienced by women in the Vietnam War.

Murphy and Watt are Samuel Beckett's first two completed novels. This chapter considers the ways in which these novels and particularly their graphic devices have been critically interpreted. The climax of Murphy modifies the use of the graphic surface of the book. By comparison with the overall coherence of Murphy, Watt appears to exclude things it could and, sometimes it seems, should contain. Use of the graphic surface in Watt is slightly less varied than that found in Murphy, but incidences are more numerous. The graphic surface of Watt, like that of Murphy before it, is used to foreground instability and generate lack of faith in the text's mediators and ultimately the text itself. Through the use of the graphic surface in his early fiction Beckett has identified and drawn on a fundamental aspect of the codex form.

The graphic surface has been part of the medium of the printed book throughout its history. Thus the utilisation of the graphic surface for effect has been potentially available in all periods since Gutenberg's system of movable type was developed. This chapter considers 'representation' and 'mimesis' rather than 'realism', for reasons of precision and clarity. The effect of modernism distancing itself from realism and thus, somehow, from reality, seems to have been encouraged by favourable as well as hostile criticism and this has its legacy today in the postwar/postmodern period. Literary criticism has always tended to interpret texts diegetically, either as an acknowledged fiction presented by an author, or against a particular standard of representation. By being associated with newer developments in literature, and supposedly leaving convention and representation behind, graphic devices were seen to be mere formal play.

Having heard the suspicions of Harry Pace's family, the inquest turned to four other categories of evidence: testimony from three of the Pace children (Dorothy, Doris, and Leslie), the police, family friends and acquaintances, and medical experts. One of these categories of evidence related to medical views on Harry's illness and forensic analysis gleaned after his death. Much of the testimony of the doctors who treated Harry served as the basis for the description of his illness. Sir William Willcox, a pioneer in forensic analysis, agreed with the post-mortem diagnosis of acute arsenical poisoning and found the timing of doses offered by Walker Hall largely correct. Finally, the court would hear from the woman at the centre of the matter: the 'tragic widow' herself. The inquest jury would have much to consider, and when it finally reached its decision, the result would be both dramatic and controversial.

As a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, Vera Brittain was well aware of the symptoms of shell shock. This chapter argues that Brittain's failure to identify her own breakdown as such is indicative of her belief that shell shock was an exclusively masculine condition that served to hinder the feminist cause. Brittain struggled with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder until 1925, and only began work on Testament of Youth in 1926. In Testament of Youth, Brittain notes that although she put on civilian clothes and looked to her parents very much like the attractive young woman known throughout Somerville for her fashionable attire, she felt alienated. Brittain's Testament of Youth clearly shows her also to have been disillusioned, angry and very bitter on her return to Oxford after the war.