To the Kwai and Back’
Myth, Memory and Memoirs of the ‘Death Railway’ 1942–1943
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12914545 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Frances Houghton (0000-0002-0979-9475, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 223-235 |
| Publication date | 2014-07-17 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of War and Culture Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1752-6272 • E-ISSN: 1752-6280 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1179/1752627214z.00000000045 |
| OpenAlex | W2020633349 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 3 |
In 1957 David Lean's film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, premiered to wide popular acclaim. Yet among the British survivors of the Burma-Thailand ‘Death’ Railway which it immortalized, the film caused much distress. Widely perceived by remaining prisoners of war (POWs) as a travesty of ‘real’ experience, The Bridge on the River Kwai induced considerable survivor anxiety about the film's endurance as a dominant cultural representation of their incarceration. This article thus examines a corpus of POW memoirs which directly responded to Lean's depiction, investigating the memoirists’ perception of a distinctive ‘myth’ spawned by the film which itself became embedded in published survivor testimony after 1957
Art · Art history · Bridge (graph theory · Depiction · Literature · Memoir · Mythology · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Representation (politics · Cambodian History and Society · History · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
| Citations per year | 0.11 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2017 - 2017 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |