mary Joannou - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by mary Joannou
The 1984-5 Miners’ Strike drew upon an exceedingly broad basis of support from representatives of... more The 1984-5 Miners’ Strike drew upon an exceedingly broad basis of support from representatives of the churches and trade unions to environmentalists, feminists, students, anti-nuclear campaigners, peace activists and inner city radicals. The strike was sustained by an extensive network of miners’ support groups working closely with the mining communities. This chapter analysis the composition, methods and effectiveness of the groups which raised prodigious amounts of money. By emphasising their gender and sexuality, Women Against Pit Closures and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners presented a substantive challenge to the chauvinistic attitudes of the coalfields. Working-class women’s activism drew upon equal rights traditions established in the mining areas between the wars. The support demonstrated by some trade unions and individual trade unionists is contrasted to the equivocation of the TUC and the support offered by the Communist Party (despite its internal divisions) and by many Labour authorities, councillors and constituency Labour Parties which contrasted with the position taken by Neil Kinnock as Labour Party leader.
Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, 1900-1950, 2006
These early texts highlight the role of women in the formulation of the aesthetic movement. The a... more These early texts highlight the role of women in the formulation of the aesthetic movement. The authors whose work is represented are Rhoda Garrett, Violet Fane, Agnes and Rhoda Garrett, Alice Meynell, Ouida, and Mary Robinson.
Critical Survey, 1998
Review of Jenny Hartley, 'Millions Like Us: British Women's Fiction of Second World War&#... more Review of Jenny Hartley, 'Millions Like Us: British Women's Fiction of Second World War' and Review of Gill Plain, 'Women's Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance'.
Special issue of the journal Women: a Cultural Review, with critical introduction written and edi... more Special issue of the journal Women: a Cultural Review, with critical introduction written and edited by Maroula Joannou, Lucie Armitt and Paulina Palmer.
Manchester University Press eBooks, Feb 1, 2018
The 1984-5 Miners’ Strike drew upon an exceedingly broad basis of support from representatives of... more The 1984-5 Miners’ Strike drew upon an exceedingly broad basis of support from representatives of the churches and trade unions to environmentalists, feminists, students, anti-nuclear campaigners, peace activists and inner city radicals. The strike was sustained by an extensive network of miners’ support groups working closely with the mining communities. This chapter analysis the composition, methods and effectiveness of the groups which raised prodigious amounts of money. By emphasising their gender and sexuality, Women Against Pit Closures and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners presented a substantive challenge to the chauvinistic attitudes of the coalfields. Working-class women’s activism drew upon equal rights traditions established in the mining areas between the wars. The support demonstrated by some trade unions and individual trade unionists is contrasted to the equivocation of the TUC and the support offered by the Communist Party (despite its internal divisions) and by many Labour authorities, councillors and constituency Labour Parties which contrasted with the position taken by Neil Kinnock as Labour Party leader.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 18, 1998
Feminist Review, Nov 1, 2004
This essay analyses Nancy Cunard's contribution to the struggle for racial justice in England and... more This essay analyses Nancy Cunard's contribution to the struggle for racial justice in England and her work with the black communities in Liverpool and London (whose histories and experiences differ radically from their counterparts in the United States) in the 1940s. It chronicles for the first time her campaign to safeguard the African collections in the Liverpool Museum and her specific contribution to the archive of black British history. This includes not only the monumental the Negro Anthology (1934) but also the tract, The White Man's Duty (1943) arguing for an end to British imperialism and for race relations legislation. Cunard is situated within a history of the Communist left in Britain and the United States. Her insistence on the primacy of race differentiates her from other white left activists in her day for whom issues of gender and race were or secondary importance compared to those of class (Cunard, 1944). Using unpublished archive material from the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas I show that Cunard's work constitutes one segment in the rich and varied mosaic of black cultural activity in the 1930s and 1940s and discuss how Cunard knew and worked alongside some of the key figures in the black British politics of her day including Una Marson, Learie Constantine, John Carter, Harold Moody, Rudolph Dunbar and Paul Robeson. A prolific writer, publisher and political activist, Cunard presented a white readership with documentation which prompted them to question their own prejudice and rendered problematic the imaging of black people as fixed embodiments of a Eurocentric sense of reality. Cunard's work in the 1930s and 1940s predates the sailing of the Empire Windrush and the accelerated immigration to Britain from the Commonwealth after the Nationality Act of 1948. It adds to our knowledge of earlier black history, narratives, settlements, and anti-racist struggles.
In 1937 two young women both aged under 20 were living within miles of each other in the self-gov... more In 1937 two young women both aged under 20 were living within miles of each other in the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia. Neither was aware of the other’s existence. It was not until the 1950s that they were to meet in London. Doris Lessing was even then struggling to come to terms with the racism and stifling provincialism of her upbringing. As Marina, a character in her story ‘A Home for the Highland Cattle’, puts it, ‘what is a British Colony but a sort of highly-flavoured suburb to England itself?’1 The one had recently left her girls’ school in Edinburgh and gone to Africa to embark on a disastrously ill-matched marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark. The other was the daughter of conservative first-generation English settlers and had been brought up on an isolated farm on the veldt.
Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952), Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) and Elizabeth Tay... more Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952), Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) and Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian (1946) are all strongly influenced by Jane Austen and were published at a historical moment in which Austen’s place in the national imaginary was being reinvented. The links between Austen, Englishness and the authors who turned to her for tutelage are worth pursuing. Born in 1896, 1912 and 1913 respectively, Smith, Taylor and Pym participated in the modernist reaction against the old-fashioned sobriety and earnestness that the Victorians had come to represent to their generation of writers; they had also lived through the momentous changes in gender relations of the early twentieth century and were acutely conscious of their newly won freedoms as modern women. The appeal of Pride and Prejudice, the text to which these modern reworkers of Austen most frequently turn, lay in Austen’s technique of centring her novels on the consciousness of spirited, assertive women: these writers recognized Austen as an accomplished arbiter of women’s choices, sensibility and reasoning, and saw Elizabeth Bennet as the champion par excellence of individual desire. As Mary Poovey puts it, it is in Pride and Prejudice that the ‘challenge that feeling and imaginative energy offer to moral authority is particularly persistent and problematic, for it is posed by the heroine herself’.1
The British Empire, and particularly India with which Britain had a close and long relationship, ... more The British Empire, and particularly India with which Britain had a close and long relationship, and which reached its zenith when Queen Victoria assumed the title Empress of India in 1877, was a major component in the English people’s sense of their own cultural identity.1 Despite the domestic reformulations of Englishness in this period, much of the power, buoyancy and confidence which still attached to Englishness both at home and abroad was dependent on the presence of the colonies. There is, however, no consensus about the effect on the English psyche of the relinquishing of empire about which there are a variety of possible historical interpretations from minimal at one extreme to catastrophic at the other.2 As Simon Featherstone puts it: ‘The sense of Englishness as an identity penetrated and destabilised by the consequences of empire had been active since the late nineteenth century. However, it took the dissolution of that empire to demonstrate the range of challenges that imperialism brought.’3
Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant... more Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice, 1938–1962 is primarily a work of literary history which provides a scholarly account of women’s writing during the 1940s and the 1950s, making some attempt to contribute to wider debates and cultural narratives. The book offers an alternative to the usual period demarcations of twentieth-century literary history which take 1945 as a watershed in addressing the writing of the 1950s in tandem with the 1940s: a time-span that makes it possible to look closely at the ramifications of the war which were felt by women long afterwards. I use a synthesis of historical retrieval, literary theory and textual analysis to provide culturally situated and historically specific readings of a wide range of texts addressing issues that relate to the changing experience of women at this time. Examples are the displacements of war, women’s radically altered understandings of their own sexuality, the retreat from empire, the relationship of women to the idea of nation, the migrant experience, the literary representation of Welsh, Scottish and English identity, and the meanings of home.
The figure of the Englishwoman was of symbolic and cultural significance in historical novels by ... more The figure of the Englishwoman was of symbolic and cultural significance in historical novels by women such as Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek (1941), Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber (1944) and Magdalen King-Hall’s The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (1944). I suggest that these romantic historical novels and others like them are effectively safely distanced displaced accounts of women’s emotional responses to the home front and that they provided women with vicarious romantic experience in contrast to the austerity and gloom that followed the Second World War. Thus historical novels offered them a means of keeping alive the recently acquired sense of adventure and freedom (including for many the enjoyment of extramarital affairs in the absence of their husbands) for which there were no longer the opportunities after men returned to the jobs in the workplace that they had vacated temporarily and women to their traditional roles in the home from 1945 onwards.
Virginia Woolf’s relationship to her identity as an English woman was complicated and ambivalent.... more Virginia Woolf’s relationship to her identity as an English woman was complicated and ambivalent. Her great pacifist polemic, Three Guineas (1938), epitomized her conviction that a woman’s relationship to her nationality was compromised by discriminatory laws. Three Guineas contains her celebrated declamation that English women were ‘stepdaugh-ters, not full daughters of England’1 because women were required to change their nationality on marriage to a foreigner: ‘A woman, whether or not she helped to beat the Germans, becomes a German if she marries a German.’2 Yet even in Three Guineas Woolf stopped significantly short of the disavowal of all patriotic feeling by recognizing that the human heart had its reasons that reason knew not: And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child’s ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.3 The start of the Second World War focused Woolf’s attention on those aspects of England that she cherished, especially the City of London with its rich literary associations and the beauty of the English countryside.
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2013
Routledge eBooks, Jun 29, 2020
The 1984-5 Miners’ Strike drew upon an exceedingly broad basis of support from representatives of... more The 1984-5 Miners’ Strike drew upon an exceedingly broad basis of support from representatives of the churches and trade unions to environmentalists, feminists, students, anti-nuclear campaigners, peace activists and inner city radicals. The strike was sustained by an extensive network of miners’ support groups working closely with the mining communities. This chapter analysis the composition, methods and effectiveness of the groups which raised prodigious amounts of money. By emphasising their gender and sexuality, Women Against Pit Closures and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners presented a substantive challenge to the chauvinistic attitudes of the coalfields. Working-class women’s activism drew upon equal rights traditions established in the mining areas between the wars. The support demonstrated by some trade unions and individual trade unionists is contrasted to the equivocation of the TUC and the support offered by the Communist Party (despite its internal divisions) and by many Labour authorities, councillors and constituency Labour Parties which contrasted with the position taken by Neil Kinnock as Labour Party leader.
Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, 1900-1950, 2006
These early texts highlight the role of women in the formulation of the aesthetic movement. The a... more These early texts highlight the role of women in the formulation of the aesthetic movement. The authors whose work is represented are Rhoda Garrett, Violet Fane, Agnes and Rhoda Garrett, Alice Meynell, Ouida, and Mary Robinson.
Critical Survey, 1998
Review of Jenny Hartley, 'Millions Like Us: British Women's Fiction of Second World War&#... more Review of Jenny Hartley, 'Millions Like Us: British Women's Fiction of Second World War' and Review of Gill Plain, 'Women's Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance'.
Special issue of the journal Women: a Cultural Review, with critical introduction written and edi... more Special issue of the journal Women: a Cultural Review, with critical introduction written and edited by Maroula Joannou, Lucie Armitt and Paulina Palmer.
Manchester University Press eBooks, Feb 1, 2018
The 1984-5 Miners’ Strike drew upon an exceedingly broad basis of support from representatives of... more The 1984-5 Miners’ Strike drew upon an exceedingly broad basis of support from representatives of the churches and trade unions to environmentalists, feminists, students, anti-nuclear campaigners, peace activists and inner city radicals. The strike was sustained by an extensive network of miners’ support groups working closely with the mining communities. This chapter analysis the composition, methods and effectiveness of the groups which raised prodigious amounts of money. By emphasising their gender and sexuality, Women Against Pit Closures and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners presented a substantive challenge to the chauvinistic attitudes of the coalfields. Working-class women’s activism drew upon equal rights traditions established in the mining areas between the wars. The support demonstrated by some trade unions and individual trade unionists is contrasted to the equivocation of the TUC and the support offered by the Communist Party (despite its internal divisions) and by many Labour authorities, councillors and constituency Labour Parties which contrasted with the position taken by Neil Kinnock as Labour Party leader.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 18, 1998
Feminist Review, Nov 1, 2004
This essay analyses Nancy Cunard's contribution to the struggle for racial justice in England and... more This essay analyses Nancy Cunard's contribution to the struggle for racial justice in England and her work with the black communities in Liverpool and London (whose histories and experiences differ radically from their counterparts in the United States) in the 1940s. It chronicles for the first time her campaign to safeguard the African collections in the Liverpool Museum and her specific contribution to the archive of black British history. This includes not only the monumental the Negro Anthology (1934) but also the tract, The White Man's Duty (1943) arguing for an end to British imperialism and for race relations legislation. Cunard is situated within a history of the Communist left in Britain and the United States. Her insistence on the primacy of race differentiates her from other white left activists in her day for whom issues of gender and race were or secondary importance compared to those of class (Cunard, 1944). Using unpublished archive material from the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas I show that Cunard's work constitutes one segment in the rich and varied mosaic of black cultural activity in the 1930s and 1940s and discuss how Cunard knew and worked alongside some of the key figures in the black British politics of her day including Una Marson, Learie Constantine, John Carter, Harold Moody, Rudolph Dunbar and Paul Robeson. A prolific writer, publisher and political activist, Cunard presented a white readership with documentation which prompted them to question their own prejudice and rendered problematic the imaging of black people as fixed embodiments of a Eurocentric sense of reality. Cunard's work in the 1930s and 1940s predates the sailing of the Empire Windrush and the accelerated immigration to Britain from the Commonwealth after the Nationality Act of 1948. It adds to our knowledge of earlier black history, narratives, settlements, and anti-racist struggles.
In 1937 two young women both aged under 20 were living within miles of each other in the self-gov... more In 1937 two young women both aged under 20 were living within miles of each other in the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia. Neither was aware of the other’s existence. It was not until the 1950s that they were to meet in London. Doris Lessing was even then struggling to come to terms with the racism and stifling provincialism of her upbringing. As Marina, a character in her story ‘A Home for the Highland Cattle’, puts it, ‘what is a British Colony but a sort of highly-flavoured suburb to England itself?’1 The one had recently left her girls’ school in Edinburgh and gone to Africa to embark on a disastrously ill-matched marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark. The other was the daughter of conservative first-generation English settlers and had been brought up on an isolated farm on the veldt.
Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952), Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) and Elizabeth Tay... more Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952), Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) and Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian (1946) are all strongly influenced by Jane Austen and were published at a historical moment in which Austen’s place in the national imaginary was being reinvented. The links between Austen, Englishness and the authors who turned to her for tutelage are worth pursuing. Born in 1896, 1912 and 1913 respectively, Smith, Taylor and Pym participated in the modernist reaction against the old-fashioned sobriety and earnestness that the Victorians had come to represent to their generation of writers; they had also lived through the momentous changes in gender relations of the early twentieth century and were acutely conscious of their newly won freedoms as modern women. The appeal of Pride and Prejudice, the text to which these modern reworkers of Austen most frequently turn, lay in Austen’s technique of centring her novels on the consciousness of spirited, assertive women: these writers recognized Austen as an accomplished arbiter of women’s choices, sensibility and reasoning, and saw Elizabeth Bennet as the champion par excellence of individual desire. As Mary Poovey puts it, it is in Pride and Prejudice that the ‘challenge that feeling and imaginative energy offer to moral authority is particularly persistent and problematic, for it is posed by the heroine herself’.1
The British Empire, and particularly India with which Britain had a close and long relationship, ... more The British Empire, and particularly India with which Britain had a close and long relationship, and which reached its zenith when Queen Victoria assumed the title Empress of India in 1877, was a major component in the English people’s sense of their own cultural identity.1 Despite the domestic reformulations of Englishness in this period, much of the power, buoyancy and confidence which still attached to Englishness both at home and abroad was dependent on the presence of the colonies. There is, however, no consensus about the effect on the English psyche of the relinquishing of empire about which there are a variety of possible historical interpretations from minimal at one extreme to catastrophic at the other.2 As Simon Featherstone puts it: ‘The sense of Englishness as an identity penetrated and destabilised by the consequences of empire had been active since the late nineteenth century. However, it took the dissolution of that empire to demonstrate the range of challenges that imperialism brought.’3
Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant... more Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice, 1938–1962 is primarily a work of literary history which provides a scholarly account of women’s writing during the 1940s and the 1950s, making some attempt to contribute to wider debates and cultural narratives. The book offers an alternative to the usual period demarcations of twentieth-century literary history which take 1945 as a watershed in addressing the writing of the 1950s in tandem with the 1940s: a time-span that makes it possible to look closely at the ramifications of the war which were felt by women long afterwards. I use a synthesis of historical retrieval, literary theory and textual analysis to provide culturally situated and historically specific readings of a wide range of texts addressing issues that relate to the changing experience of women at this time. Examples are the displacements of war, women’s radically altered understandings of their own sexuality, the retreat from empire, the relationship of women to the idea of nation, the migrant experience, the literary representation of Welsh, Scottish and English identity, and the meanings of home.
The figure of the Englishwoman was of symbolic and cultural significance in historical novels by ... more The figure of the Englishwoman was of symbolic and cultural significance in historical novels by women such as Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek (1941), Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber (1944) and Magdalen King-Hall’s The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (1944). I suggest that these romantic historical novels and others like them are effectively safely distanced displaced accounts of women’s emotional responses to the home front and that they provided women with vicarious romantic experience in contrast to the austerity and gloom that followed the Second World War. Thus historical novels offered them a means of keeping alive the recently acquired sense of adventure and freedom (including for many the enjoyment of extramarital affairs in the absence of their husbands) for which there were no longer the opportunities after men returned to the jobs in the workplace that they had vacated temporarily and women to their traditional roles in the home from 1945 onwards.
Virginia Woolf’s relationship to her identity as an English woman was complicated and ambivalent.... more Virginia Woolf’s relationship to her identity as an English woman was complicated and ambivalent. Her great pacifist polemic, Three Guineas (1938), epitomized her conviction that a woman’s relationship to her nationality was compromised by discriminatory laws. Three Guineas contains her celebrated declamation that English women were ‘stepdaugh-ters, not full daughters of England’1 because women were required to change their nationality on marriage to a foreigner: ‘A woman, whether or not she helped to beat the Germans, becomes a German if she marries a German.’2 Yet even in Three Guineas Woolf stopped significantly short of the disavowal of all patriotic feeling by recognizing that the human heart had its reasons that reason knew not: And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child’s ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.3 The start of the Second World War focused Woolf’s attention on those aspects of England that she cherished, especially the City of London with its rich literary associations and the beauty of the English countryside.
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2013
Routledge eBooks, Jun 29, 2020