J. R. R. Tolkien, War, and Nationalism
Tolkien may not have intentionally created his fictive nations to mirror real nations, but his world certainly bears the scars of his experiences of war. The World Wars heightened his fear of losing everything that he loved about his local culture through literal obliteration or assimilation into another culture in the event of England‘s losing. Tolkien saw the nation as a social construct that potentially could minimize losses, if not wholly protect local culture from the forces that threatened to destroy it. Yet he also perceived the nation‘s limitations in its ability to protect culture. A nation could grow too large for itself, becoming obsessed with consuming other nations. For Tolkien, national property-amassing leads to a loss of the cultural identity that nationhood aims to preserve. When the forces threatening individual nations become overwhelming, those nations often need to join forces to prevent being taken over by other, more powerful countries. An examination of Tolkien‘s fiction and numerous other sources, including essays and personal letters, suggests that he felt that separate nations should co-exist without imposing on one another, and that the nation taking over others would lose its own identity, whether gradually or suddenly. Despite Tolkien‘s efforts to distance himself from what he felt modernity represented, his fiction (whether consciously or not) grapples with the mid-twentieth century ideological conflicts surrounding the nation. The resulting sense of loss and powerlessness underlies much of Tolkien‘s fiction and leads him to a concept of the nation as an imperfect protector of culture, tempered by its need to rely on other nations. INDEX WORDS: Tolkien, Nationalism, World War I, World War II, National identity, National memory, Internationalism, Individualism, Modernism J. R. R. TOLKIEN, WAR, AND NATIONALISM
The Security Service, the Communist Party of Great Britain and British Fascism, 1932–51
In the often dramatic story of the confrontations between the labour movement and British fascism from the 1930s until the early Cold War, there is a tendency to forget the role played by a third player in the proceedings, the state authorities, particularly the security service and the various police forces around the country. Yet although the state saw its role as being that of an impartial umpire between the combatants, there was a significant difference in the attitude adopted towards the two parties: the labour movement was seen as a tool to further the alleged sinister motives of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), whilst the British Union of Fascists (BUF) was perceived as a contradictory mixture of disillusioned right-wing patriotic Conservatives and revolutionary nationalists to whom Mosley inclined. The growth of civil unrest and what was perceived by the state as extremism in the interwar period, led to political surveillance of the CPGB and the BUF, by the secret agencies of government. The function of the police and the security authorities was to maintain public order and to investigate presumed linkages with foreign powers, particularly with regard to financing political activity, the dissemination of propaganda and the organisation of espionage and subversion. British security after 1921 was particularly concerned that the CPGB was controlled and directed by the Comintern, the Communist International, with its stated objective of organising the revolutionary overthrow of the British Empire and furthering the interests of the Soviet Union.
Unity Identity Text Self
Abstract Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.