Open Book: Fiction following the Armistice; Beowulf reimagined; James Daunt

Books and Authors

BBC

Society & Culture, Books

4.2 • 824 Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Exploring literary responses to the Great War in the immediate aftermath of the Armistice. The University of Leicester's Victoria Stewart, and biographer Jean Moorcroft Wilson, discuss the ways that fiction reflected the horror of war in the decade after 1918.

Novelist Richard T. Kelly considers the pitfalls of including real people in works of fiction.

Bestselling novelist Maria Dahvana Headley explains why Beowulf felt like the appropriate framework through which to explore race, class and violence in contemporary America.

And Managing Director of Waterstones James Daunt helps Open Book to launch a new series looking at the challenges of making bookselling pay.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In Northern Ireland, from the late 70s to the early 90s, the IRA killed over 40 alleged informers.
0:08.0	But the man who often found, tortured and sometimes killed these people on behalf of the IRA
0:12.0	was himself an informer, a secret British army agent with the codename Stakeknife.
0:18.0	Who gets to play God? And why me? Why my family?
0:21.3	When lies are still being told to this day,
0:24.0	who do you believe?
0:25.1	I wouldn't even know where to start,
0:26.7	and I'm with the IRA.
0:28.5	Steakknife.
0:29.7	Listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:33.5	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:36.9	Music, radio, podcasts.
0:46.5	Church bells, which had fallen silent during the First World War,
0:50.4	rang out across Britain in 1918 to announce the armistice.
0:53.4	But as the country attempted to come to terms with history,
0:55.3	what part did literature play? From all quiet on the Western attempted to come to terms with history, what part did literature play?
1:01.2	From all quiet on the Western Front to Birdsong, a farewell to arms and goodbye to all that.
1:08.5	There have been so many classic books inspired by or set during the Great War that it's hard to imagine a literary landscape without them.
1:11.9	On today's open book, we discuss what people were actually reading in 1918 and ask whether, even in the escapist fiction of the time, war cast its
1:18.8	shadow. Four years ago, as we marked the start of the Great War on Open Book, the late
1:24.5	beloved writer Helen Dunmore described that cultural silence to me. Here she is.
1:29.9	I really do feel very strongly that the First World War, the impact, the echo of that has taken a
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