Marina Mackay
Biographic Data
| ID | 3593830 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marina Mackay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marina |
| FAMILY NAME | Mackay |
| SIGNATURE | MACKAY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6537-5458 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Anthony Powell and the Cold War Conscience of the Novel Series
Although the most characteristic fictional mode of the period, the mid-twentieth-century novel sequence attracts little critical attention. Of particular interest for exploring its temporal distinctiveness are those autobiographical sequences that were acclaimed in their 1950s and 1960s time as Second World War books, but which were, this essay argues, essentially Cold War endeavours. Focusing on Anthony Powell's representation of his wartime wor…
Trophy Hunters: War Writing in the Twentieth Century
“Need I say that there is nothing so romantic as war?” Wyndham Lewis asks in Blasting and Bombardiering, his memoir of years spent as a Great War soldier and modernist agitator: “All this culminated of course in the scenery of the battlefields, like desolate lunar panoramas. That matched the first glimpses of the Pacific, as seen by the earliest circumnavigators” (Lewis 114). In a characteristic provocation, Lewis sets out to undercut what by 193…
Afterword
Muriel Spark and self-help
Muriel Spark’s novels are full of characters who offer advice to live by – advice both good and bad. Focusing particularly on her fiction about girls and women, this essay reads this career-long feature of Spark's writing in relation to the mid-century publishing phenomenon of the self-help bestseller. It has been a truism at least since Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ that the modern novel has no wisdom to share with its readers, but this es…
Olivia Manning: A woman at warDEIRDRE David
The Wartime Rise of The Rise of the Novel
This essay argues that Ian Watt's influential The Rise of the Novel (1957) was decisively shaped by his experience as a prisoner of war and forced laborer on the Burma Railway. In reconstructing that experience, the essay historicizes the lasting association Watt established between the rise of the novel and the rise of individualism
The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism
Modernism arose in a period of accelerating globalization in the late nineteenth century. Modernist writers and artists, while often loyal to their country in times of war, aimed to rise above the national and ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century in service to a cosmopolitan ideal. This Companion explores the international aspects of literary modernism by mapping the history of the movement across Europe and within each country. T…
Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (review)
Reviewed by: Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self Marina MacKay (bio) James Hinton. Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. 254 pp. ISBN 978-0199574667, $45.00. Nine Wartime Lives is a fascinating collection of biographical sketches of men and women who kept diaries during the Second World War for Mass-Observation, the pioneering British social research pro…
Modernism and World War II
The Lunacy of Men, the Idiocy of Women: Woolf, West, and War
This essay argues that the parallel careers of Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf illuminate the extent to which modernist women writers came to identify the centrality of feminist consciousness in an understanding of public violence. In their fictional representations of World War I, West's The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922), both authors use narrative indirections to diagnose the two problems of patriarchal culture: t…
Marabou Stork Nightmares: Irvine Welsh's anthropological vision
It has been suggested that the internal divisions in the notion of ‘Scottishness’ have led Scotland's Enlightenment writers to approach the nation with an ‘anthropological’ and ‘anthologising’ vision. In this article, I argue that we can see such a tendency in the work of the contemporary novelist Irvine Welsh, whose second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares, dissects the masculinist tribalism of Scottish underclass culture. In performing the anthro…
The Wartime Rise of The Rise of the Novel
This essay argues that Ian Watt's influential The Rise of the Novel (1957) was decisively shaped by his experience as a prisoner of war and forced laborer on the Burma Railway. In reconstructing that experience, the essay historicizes the lasting association Watt established between the rise of the novel and the rise of individualism
The Lunacy of Men, the Idiocy of Women: Woolf, West, and War
This essay argues that the parallel careers of Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf illuminate the extent to which modernist women writers came to identify the centrality of feminist consciousness in an understanding of public violence. In their fictional representations of World War I, West's The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922), both authors use narrative indirections to diagnose the two problems of patriarchal culture: t…
Marabou Stork Nightmares: Irvine Welsh's anthropological vision
It has been suggested that the internal divisions in the notion of ‘Scottishness’ have led Scotland's Enlightenment writers to approach the nation with an ‘anthropological’ and ‘anthologising’ vision. In this article, I argue that we can see such a tendency in the work of the contemporary novelist Irvine Welsh, whose second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares, dissects the masculinist tribalism of Scottish underclass culture. In performing the anthro…
Modernism and World War II
Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (review)
Reviewed by: Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self Marina MacKay (bio) James Hinton. Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. 254 pp. ISBN 978-0199574667, $45.00. Nine Wartime Lives is a fascinating collection of biographical sketches of men and women who kept diaries during the Second World War for Mass-Observation, the pioneering British social research pro…
The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism
Modernism arose in a period of accelerating globalization in the late nineteenth century. Modernist writers and artists, while often loyal to their country in times of war, aimed to rise above the national and ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century in service to a cosmopolitan ideal. This Companion explores the international aspects of literary modernism by mapping the history of the movement across Europe and within each country. T…
The Wartime Rise of The Rise of the Novel
This essay argues that Ian Watt's influential The Rise of the Novel (1957) was decisively shaped by his experience as a prisoner of war and forced laborer on the Burma Railway. In reconstructing that experience, the essay historicizes the lasting association Watt established between the rise of the novel and the rise of individualism
Olivia Manning: A woman at warDEIRDRE David
Muriel Spark and self-help
Muriel Spark’s novels are full of characters who offer advice to live by – advice both good and bad. Focusing particularly on her fiction about girls and women, this essay reads this career-long feature of Spark's writing in relation to the mid-century publishing phenomenon of the self-help bestseller. It has been a truism at least since Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ that the modern novel has no wisdom to share with its readers, but this es…
Afterword
Trophy Hunters: War Writing in the Twentieth Century
“Need I say that there is nothing so romantic as war?” Wyndham Lewis asks in Blasting and Bombardiering, his memoir of years spent as a Great War soldier and modernist agitator: “All this culminated of course in the scenery of the battlefields, like desolate lunar panoramas. That matched the first glimpses of the Pacific, as seen by the earliest circumnavigators” (Lewis 114). In a characteristic provocation, Lewis sets out to undercut what by 193…
Anthony Powell and the Cold War Conscience of the Novel Series
Although the most characteristic fictional mode of the period, the mid-twentieth-century novel sequence attracts little critical attention. Of particular interest for exploring its temporal distinctiveness are those autobiographical sequences that were acclaimed in their 1950s and 1960s time as Second World War books, but which were, this essay argues, essentially Cold War endeavours. Focusing on Anthony Powell's representation of his wartime wor…
History (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Literature (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Art history (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Contemporary Literature and Criticism (3 works)