Books by Katherine Cooper
The novels of Storm Jameson and their depictions of Britain's relationship to Europe around the S... more The novels of Storm Jameson and their depictions of Britain's relationship to Europe around the Second World War represent a crucial departure from the work of her contemporaries. As the first female President of English PEN, Jameson led her country's wartime literary community through turbulent times in history by focusing on European – rather than pointedly British – experiences of war.
War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Storm Jameson is a timely critique situated within the historical and theoretical contexts so fundamental to understanding her work. Presenting previously unpublished archival material that documents her work as an ambassador for British writers during a time of national upheaval, Katherine Cooper reveals how the novelist's pacifism and evolving attitudes to war and peace were underpinned by her overarching vision for the post-war world. Drawing comparisons to the works of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene and others, this study shows how Jameson's novels gesture towards prevalent internationalist perspectives and reshapes how we view the literary history of the period.
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Articles and Chapters by Katherine Cooper
Literature and History, 2018
If, as Peter Gatrell has suggested, the figure of the refugee was defined and even constructed du... more If, as Peter Gatrell has suggested, the figure of the refugee was defined and even constructed during the twentieth century, then the Second World War was a crucial period in this process (Gatrell, 2013). This article looks at three representations of refugee figures from this period, Graham Greene's novel The Name of Action (1930), Rebecca West's short story ‘Around Us the Wail of Sirens’ (1941) and Storm Jameson's novel The Black Laurel (1947), evaluating them in light of recent scholarship around hospitality and asylum to suggest that these refugee characters subvert the norms and customs of British hospitality. It argues that in these three texts, refugees act as ‘threshold figures’, exposing the realities of war and the inadequacy of British social processes to contain them. In doing so, they point towards a different way of representing the refugee as an active agent, rather than a passive recipient in both political processes and social interactions.
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British Women's Writing 1930-1960: Between the Waves, 2020
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Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2014
In Europe to Let (1940), Margaret Storm Jameson – novelist, essayist and former pacifist –present... more In Europe to Let (1940), Margaret Storm Jameson – novelist, essayist and former pacifist –presents a Europe characterised by corruption and cruelty. Ranging from Cologne to Vienna, and Prague to Budapest, the novel critiques Europe’s institutions, its increasingly problematic politics and, most importantly, its poverty-stricken cities as the cause of the crisis. Exploring the presentation in this novel of the problems inherent in Europe, this essay makes links between Jameson’s fears and preoccupations and those of her contemporaries in order to elucidate this novel’s contribution to discourses around the threat to Europe and the end of civilization at the beginning of World War Two. It demonstrates the anxieties embedded in the narrative around modernity, progress and in particular, an overblown and ruthless capitalism, to exact a reading of this novel as an indication of Jameson’s own hopes and fears for Europe during this time, as well as a testament to her relevance as a cultural commentator in her own right. It explores the representation of war in Europe to Let as a means of rehabilitation for the whole continent.
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War and Displacment in the Twentieth Century ed. Sandra Barkhof and Angela K. Smith, 2014
Traditionally in narratives of war, women represent a constant: where men go off to fight, women ... more Traditionally in narratives of war, women represent a constant: where men go off to fight, women remain to continue the nation, to maintain a place of belonging in a war-torn landscape. Yet, millions of European women were themselves forced to flee their homes during World War Two, under the threat of sexual, racial and political persecution. This chapter explores the British writer Storm Jameson’s representation of displaced women during the Nazi invasion of France in May and June 1940, in her novel Cloudless May (1943). It concentrates specifically on women’s feelings of powerlessness in the face of a war over which they hold no real political influence, but which would affect their lives profoundly. Through examining this fictional representation of France, it interrogates its understanding of the position of women in this country in the days and weeks before what has become known as the Exodus, as refugees fled in the face of the German advance. In doing so it comes to interrogate the ways in which this novel depicts the role of women during wartime and their place within the nation during times of threat and occupation, particularly in terms of their displacement.
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Papers by Katherine Cooper
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War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Storm Jameson, 2020
The novels of Storm Jameson and their depictions of Britain's relationship to Europe around t... more The novels of Storm Jameson and their depictions of Britain's relationship to Europe around the Second World War represent a crucial departure from the work of her contemporaries. As the first female President of English PEN, Jameson led her country's wartime literary community through turbulent times in history by focusing on European – rather than pointedly British – experiences of war. War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Storm Jameson is a timely critique situated within the historical and theoretical contexts so fundamental to understanding her work. Presenting previously unpublished archival material that documents her work as an ambassador for British writers during a time of national upheaval, Katherine Cooper reveals how the novelist's pacifism and evolving attitudes to war and peace were underpinned by her overarching vision for the post-war world. Drawing comparisons to the works of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene and others, this study shows how Jameson's novels gesture towards prevalent internationalist perspectives and reshapes how we view the literary history of the period.
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Literature & History, 2018
If, as Peter Gatrell has suggested, the figure of the refugee was defined and even constructed du... more If, as Peter Gatrell has suggested, the figure of the refugee was defined and even constructed during the twentieth century, then the Second World War was a crucial period in this process (Gatrell, 2013). This article looks at three representations of refugee figures from this period, Graham Greene's novel The Name of Action (1930), Rebecca West's short story ‘Around Us the Wail of Sirens’ (1941) and Storm Jameson's novel The Black Laurel (1947), evaluating them in light of recent scholarship around hospitality and asylum to suggest that these refugee characters subvert the norms and customs of British hospitality. It argues that in these three texts, refugees act as ‘threshold figures’, exposing the realities of war and the inadequacy of British social processes to contain them. In doing so, they point towards a different way of representing the refugee as an active agent, rather than a passive recipient in both political processes and social interactions.
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Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2014
Abstract In Europe to Let (1940a), Margaret Storm Jameson—novelist, essayist, and former pacifist... more Abstract In Europe to Let (1940a), Margaret Storm Jameson—novelist, essayist, and former pacifist—presents a Europe characterized by corruption and cruelty. Ranging from Cologne to Vienna, and Prague to Budapest, the novel critiques Europe's institutions, its increasingly problematic politics and, most importantly, its poverty-stricken cities as the cause of the crisis. Exploring the presentation in this novel of the problems inherent in Europe, this article makes links between Jameson's fears and preoccupations and those of her contemporaries in order to elucidate this novel's contribution to discourses around the threat to Europe and the end of civilization at the beginning of the World War Two. It demonstrates the anxieties embedded in the narrative around modernity, progress, and in particular, an overblown and ruthless capitalism, to exact a reading of this novel as an indication of Jameson's own hopes and fears for Europe during this time, as well as a testament to her relevance as a cultural commentator in her own right. It explores the representation of war in Europe to Let as a means of rehabilitation for the whole continent.
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Liverpool University Press eBooks, Jul 17, 2020
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This paper posits that the literary salon was used after World War One as a weapon of resistance ... more This paper posits that the literary salon was used after World War One as a weapon of resistance against what was seen as a crisis in European culture. Paul Valéry wrote in 1919 that ‘thousands of young writers and artists have died; the illusion of a European culture has been lost, and knowledge has been proved impotent to save anything whatsoever’ (22), voicing for the first time the increasingly popular opinion that culture, particularly literary culture, in Europe was being destroyed by a growing wave of inhumanity or anti-intellectualism. This paper maps how, in the 1920s and 1930s as this point of view grew in popularity, the literary salon became a space of resistance, drawing together writers and intellectuals to consolidate and mobilise European culture against these dehumanising influences. It looks at the descriptions of salons or gatherings in the living rooms and drawing rooms of London in the biographies of Storm Jameson, Phyllis Bottome and Graham Greene to explore how British writers and refugees or exiles were united in these spaces in their commitment to preserve European culture. Examining the representation of these spaces of resistance to this cultural decline or of cultural rejuvenation in novels such as Bottome’s Old Wine (1924), Greene’s It’s A Battlefield (1934) and Jameson’s Before the Crossing (1947), it comes to argue that these fictional representations acted, not only as an examination or critique of the literary salon as a phenomenon, but also established it as a space for building crucial new professional networks and new ideas to sustain and rejuvenate European literary culture. Bringing together accounts of real-life salons with their fictional counterparts, this paper analyses how this long-standing literary tradition took on a new guise in the interwar and World War Two period as a branch of Europe’s cultural armoury.
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This paper will investigate how Storm Jameson relates to her British identity in The Moon is Maki... more This paper will investigate how Storm Jameson relates to her British identity in The Moon is Making (1937) and Cousin Honoré (1940). Working through her attitudes to Britishness and her rejection of pacifism during the late 1930s, it will examine the ways in which she projected her anxieties about the future of Britain onto Europe. It looks at the geographical movement from England in The Moon is Making to France in Cousin Honoré as indicative of this move from pacifism and anxiety about the Britain’s future to a desire to reach out to and defend wider Europe against Nazism. Exploring her presentation of France in Cousin Honoré, it will investigate the ways in which the novel, seemingly a homage to France, can also be read as a refiguring of Britishness in its presentations of landscape and of characters such as Honoré himself. Comparing these portrayals with her presentations of the North Yorkshire landscapes where she grew up in The Moon is Making, it explores the reasons behind her decision to concentrate on the threat the French countryside and way of life, rather than those of the British. In doing so it charts how not only Jameson’s attitudes to war but also her understandings of Britishness as inherently linked to the Europeanness is depicted in these two novels. In doing so it comments upon the ways in which British national identity is defined not only in terms of internal regional identities, but is for writers like Jameson also bound up with the identities of the European nations under direct threat during this time.
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This paper discusses the ways in which travel narratives are used in Storm Jameson’s novels The C... more This paper discusses the ways in which travel narratives are used in Storm Jameson’s novels The Captain’s Wife (1939) and The Diary of Mary Harvey Russell (1945). It explores how these novels, which depict a mother and her daughter, Sylvia Russell and Mary Harvey as each adjusts from girlhood to married life, juxtapose the freedoms of travel with the constraints of female domestic life. Concentrating in particular the ways in which these narratives of travel are passed down from mother to daughter in these two novels, it interrogates the ways in which these women’s experiences of travel and domesticity overlap to emphasise the lack of progress in women’s lives. The Captain’s Wife tells the story of young Sylvia Russell who marries a merchant seaman and in doing so opens up for herself up a new world of travel and adventure aboard his ship. However, as the novel progresses Sylvia Russell’s travels are curtailed by the arrival of her first child, Mary, which leaves her confined to a small village on the North Yorkshire coast and shackled to her domestic responsibilities. She is left with just a taste of an outside world from which she feels shut off forever. Embittered and frustrated by this constraining domesticity, Russell blames her daughter for her loss and as her own story The Diary of Mary Harvey Russell shows, Mary grows up heavy with the burdens of Sylvia’s regrets and with her own memories of travel aboard her father’s ship. This paper explores how these matrilineal narratives demonstrate the challenges faced by women whose lives are opened up by new experiences of exotic travel before shrinking again to the domestic settings dictated by traditional gender relations and family life.
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The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, 2012
In recent years, the female figure in history has become increasingly visible — previously obscur... more In recent years, the female figure in history has become increasingly visible — previously obscured, she is now palpable, multidimensional, and undeniably present. This figure has flourished in contemporary fiction, the authors of which have worked to establish her as central to historical narratives in a range of both fictional and factual scenarios. This collection explores the female figure in recent historical fiction: the tremendous success of writers such as Philippa Gregory, Kate Mosse and Sarah Waters is testament to the fact that the female figure is now not only desirable but also marketable. The collection interrogates the growth of the contemporary historical fiction genre by examining the implications of these new narratives for contemporary gender politics. Part I, ‘Historical Women: Revisioning Real Lives’, contains chapters which interrogate recent recastings of real women, such as Anne Boleyn, Clara Schumann and Grace Marks, who have previously been misrepresented in historical discourses. Part II, ‘Imagined Histories: Romancing Fictional Heroines’, concentrates on the gender politics inherent in representations of fictional women and their sexuality. Finally, Part III, ‘Rewriting History: Reasserting the Female’, discusses the implications of such representations, reflecting on these repeated rewritings of history in terms of feminism, postmodernism and metafiction, and developing an understanding of the way in which these female figures are received and interpreted within the context of historical fiction.
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Books by Katherine Cooper
War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Storm Jameson is a timely critique situated within the historical and theoretical contexts so fundamental to understanding her work. Presenting previously unpublished archival material that documents her work as an ambassador for British writers during a time of national upheaval, Katherine Cooper reveals how the novelist's pacifism and evolving attitudes to war and peace were underpinned by her overarching vision for the post-war world. Drawing comparisons to the works of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene and others, this study shows how Jameson's novels gesture towards prevalent internationalist perspectives and reshapes how we view the literary history of the period.
Articles and Chapters by Katherine Cooper
Papers by Katherine Cooper
War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Storm Jameson is a timely critique situated within the historical and theoretical contexts so fundamental to understanding her work. Presenting previously unpublished archival material that documents her work as an ambassador for British writers during a time of national upheaval, Katherine Cooper reveals how the novelist's pacifism and evolving attitudes to war and peace were underpinned by her overarching vision for the post-war world. Drawing comparisons to the works of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene and others, this study shows how Jameson's novels gesture towards prevalent internationalist perspectives and reshapes how we view the literary history of the period.