Essays of the ‘age of catastrophe’ encompassing the two World Wars have been judged aesthetic failures because, in their argumentative force and dogmatism, they break with a fundamental commitment of the essayistic: to provide an open, even democratic relational space between reader and writer. This has hindered our ability to recognise them as important objects of historic memory. Assuming that the rhetorical power of the essay may just as often be used to defend truth and justice as to agitate for and justify violent conflict, this chapter will examine the essayistic mode of political essays by Rudyard Kipling and Vernon Lee. It will argue that political essays often display the same longing for connection and attachment that has long been deemed the cornerstone of the literary essay.

Martin Luther King Jr. argues that means and ends must be commensurable. If one wants to bring about a more equitable society, one must do so by equitable means. This means-ends principle is reiterated in the writings of Gandhi and King, but it has often been treated as something mysterious. A pragmatic case can be made for it if we pay attention to the dynamics of communication. Gandhi and King argue for an approach to social conflict that combines compassion for the needs of their opponents with a resolute opposition to the injustices these opponents perpetrate. Respect and respectability without challenge and protest will not contribute to the development of a more equitable society. But neither will challenge and protest without respect and respectability. By attending to how nonviolent direct actionists combine these two pressures, I develop an alternative to the dominant perspectives in communication ethics, but one that shares their concerns for morality, effectiveness, and nonviolence.

This chapter reviews the ideas and reception of Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It focuses on a single, as yet untold, aspect: how Economic Consequences fits into the context of debates about the construction of the memory of the Great War. It asks: ‘What role did Keynes and The Economic Consequences of the Peace play in the formation of the “futility myth” which dominates British popular perception of the First World War to this day?’

This chapter shows the significant role played by religious politics in the German Revolution of 1918. It examines first how the secularist subculture within German socialism contributed to the formation of wartime opposition that led to the 1917 split of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It then follows the actions of secularists during the revolution itself, beginning with the attempts of one of Germany’s most prominent secularists, Adolph Hoffmann, to force through a radical program of secularization upon assuming a key position in the revolutionary government of 1918. It traces the politics of secularism in the writing of the Weimar Constitution before taking up the relationship of secularism to the “pure” council movement, which emerged in the years from 1919 to 1922 as an alternative both to parliamentary democracy and to Bolshevik party rule.

This considers the impact of systemic critiques of war, developed in the period of the American and French Revolutions, upon the work of two novelists. Samuel Jackson Pratts Emma Corbett, written during – and in opposition to – the American War of Independence, describes a young Engish heroines growing awareness of the role of property relations in supporting martial ideals and causing wars, and her conversion to a form of pacifism. Charlotte Smiths The Old Manor House, written in the early years of the French Revolution, describes a British soldier fighting in the American War of Independence, who comes to question the purpose and causes of the war, including the chivalric values of the ruling class. Both novels show how war exposes the selfish foundations of ordinary social life. While Jackson Pratts heroine escapes compromise through death, Smiths hero inherits the estate of the woman whose aristocratic values he despises.

This considers the role of Thomas Clarkson as peace campaigner. Clarkson played a leading role in the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the 1780s. Much of his thinking about peace was influenced by the prospects of colonial development. His Portrait of Quakerism (1806), a pioneering explanation of pacific Quaker principles, was followed by his Memoirs of William Penn (1813), the pacifist founder of Pennsylvania, which recommends setting up seminaries to teach the children of the rich, and offers Penn as a model of peaceful colonial relations. As a member of the Africa Institution and the Sierra Leone Company, Clarkson was personally involved in plans for peaceful colonizing. This interest is reflected in The Herald of Peace, the journal of the Peace Society Clarkson helped to establish, in which the example of Penn is often cited. The peace campaign was rooted in the goal of spreading Christianity and European influence globally.

This chapter examines the ways in which pre-war drama explored growing fears over major international conflict. Works considered include Du Maurier’s An Englishman’s Home (1909), Zangwill’s The War God (1911) and a number of less well-known plays and comic skits. The chapter contextualises these works in relation to the fraught geopolitical landscape in which they were produced and the wider cultural phenomenon of ‘invasion fiction’. Both critical and public reactions to these productions are also examined. The chapter concludes by exploring how the pre-war plays established the play-book for propagandistic war-time drama as theatre mobilised for the war effort.

Like Spear Smith, Catley was intensely self-conscious, sought to create an identity founded on ruralism, and had cultural aspirations (in his case literary rather than artistic). While Catley was no more successful as a poet than Spear Smith as an artist, at least in his younger years his engagement with rural landscapes appears to have brought him more satisfaction and peace of mind. In part, this was because Catley’s ruralism fostered rather than replaced social relationships, through walks, cycle rides and, especially, youth hostelling. It may also have been that less was at stake in Catley’s ruralism, allowing him to take a more objective interest in rural landscapes and, paradoxically, to find more emotional fulfilment in them. Certainly Catley explored the rural landscapes around his Bristol home both intensively and extensively, offering him rich opportunities for self-discovery and self-development. However, as middle age and domesticity came upon him, the vital and life-affirming role landscape had played in his younger days receded into the past.

The end of a war is not just about a societys making peace with its former enemy. It is also about the societys making peace with itself. This begins with welcoming back those who have gone to war, those who must be at peace with themselves and at peace with others over what they have done. My title, The Lament of the Demobilized, is from Vera Brittain, a leading pacifist voice of the twentieth century whose pacifism – I call it soldier pacifism – was grounded in her first-hand experience of war. Such soldier pacifism holds that the grief of knowing war means the soldier can never fully return home, and that this constitutes an indictment of all war. I explore this theme through memoirs, literature, poetry, as well as recent topics in just war theory.

The end of a war is not just about a societys making peace with its former enemy. It is also about the societys making peace with itself. This begins with welcoming back those who have gone to war, those who must be at peace with themselves and at peace with others over what they have done. My title, The Lament of the Demobilized, is from Vera Brittain, a leading pacifist voice of the twentieth century whose pacifism – I call it soldier pacifism – was grounded in her first-hand experience of war. Such soldier pacifism holds that the grief of knowing war means the soldier can never fully return home, and that this constitutes an indictment of all war. I explore this theme through memoirs, literature, poetry, as well as recent topics in just war theory.

While the canon of twentieth-century Russian poetry has expanded considerably in recent decades, little attention was paid to most of the poetry written about World War One for almost a hundred years. The conflict occupied a marginal position in Soviet-era cultural memory; many of the poets who wrote about it were similarly sidelined, although the war was commemorated by émigrés. The poetic response to the war was aesthetically diverse and expressed attitudes ranging from an enthusiastic embrace of patriotic duty to pacifism. There were few ‘soldier poets’: Nikolai Gumilev was among the very few established or aspiring poets who actively pursued front-line military service. As the centenary of the war’s outbreak approached, and interest grew in Russia’s imperial history and émigré culture, scholars and editors have begun to introduce readers to this unfamiliar poetic legacy. The process of forming a canon of World War One poetry is only just beginning.

This chapter provides a summary of the deep-rooted connections between Canadian Doukhobors (Doukhobortsy or Spirit Wrestlers) and Tolstoy, starting with important anti-militaristic events organized by the Doukhobor leader Peter Verigin at the end of the nineteenth century: refusals to serve in the army and the Burning of the Weapons in Doukhobor villages in the Caucasus, Russian Empire. These events as well as the following severe persecutions of Doukhobors in Russia caught the attention of Tolstoy because this peasant anti-militaristic movement resembled his own peaceful non-resistance teachings. Tolstoy became one of the most passionate protectors and a dear friend of the Doukhobors, commending their pacifism in his works. The chapter describes the first encounter of a group of Doukhobors with Tolstoy, and Tolstoy’s friendship and correspondence with Peter Verigin, as well as the pivotal role played by Tolstoy in organizing and funding the Doukhobors’ immigration to Canada. In conclusion, the author points out a few other correspondences between Tolstoy’s teachings and Doukhobor beliefs, such as agrarianism, communal cultivation of land, the unity of people, and rejection of Church institutions and priests. The chapter highlights the significance of pacifism (as it is understood by Tolstoy and the Doukhobors) in contemporary context.

From the 1880s onward, a vigorous movement inspired by Tolstoy’s Christian anarchist thought developed both within the Russian Empire and internationally. This chapter traces the activity of Tolstoyan communities, publishing houses, societies, and newspapers, and considers the role they played in building and maintaining international Tolstoyan networks. It considers how Tolstoy’s thought was interpreted in different national contexts as well as how and why enthusiasm for Tolstoy’s ideas emerged or revived in specific periods: it also discusses some key debates and challenges that Tolstoyans confronted, and the ways these were debated both within the movement and in interactions with those outside it. Tolstoy’s focus on following one’s own conscience meant that he strongly objected to the idea of a movement in his name. But as this chapter makes clear, while Tolstoyans were always fiercely independent-minded, the ideas and causes around which they united gave them a strong sense of being part of a collective, wherever and whenever they were active.

Pacifist activism flourished in Britain and America during the first half of the twentieth century, and peace was a central preoccupation for writers and intellectuals before and during both world wars. Vera Brittain, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, and Aldous Huxley were all actively engaged in some form of peace writing. This chapter examines this history in the British context, from the impact of conscription during the First World War to the grave challenges to peace of the 1930s. It investigates a variety of texts by conscientious objectors, peace campaigners, feminist pacifists, anti-war poets, public intellectuals, and internationalist reformers. This literary and political history reveals how the notion of peace shifted radically during this period. What began as a moral imperative – inherited from Christian teachings and the liberal legacy of the Enlightenment – was transformed into a secular notion with extensive political potential. As this chapter shows, pacifist thought underpinned arguments towards socio-political reform, and it shaped the language of rights central to political discourse after the Second World War.