Author : Charles Lowe
Publisher : Good Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 15,77 MB
Release : 2019-12-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN :
This book offers a speculative account of a hypothetical war that could have broken out in the late 19th century. It presents an insightful forecast of what could have happened in the Great War, written at a time of political unrest and mounting tensions in Europe. This book offers an intriguing account of fictional incidents that bear striking parallels to the actual events of World War I.
Author : Philip Colomb
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 20,94 MB
Release : 2017-07-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1134895119
First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author : Daniel Pick
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 31,86 MB
Release : 1996-01-01
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780300067194
This intriguing study examines Western perceptions of war in and beyond the nineteenth century, surveying the writings of novelists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, poets, natural scientists, and journalists to trace the terms of modern thought on the nature of military conflict. Daniel Pick brings together philosophical and historical models of war with fictions of invasion, propaganda from the Great War, interpretations of shellshock and speculations about the biological value of conquest. He discusses the work of such familiar commentators as Clausewitz, Engels, and Treitschke, and examines little-known writings by Proudhon, De Quincey, Ruskin, Valery, and many others, culminating in the extraordinary dialogue between Freud and Einstein, Why War? He analyses Victorian fears of French contamination through the Channel Tunnel as well as the widespread continuing dread of German domination. And he charts the history of the pervasive European belief that war is beneficial or at least functionally necessary. A central theme of the book is the disturbing relationship between machinery and destruction. Visions of relentless technological 'progress' and the inexorable advance of the military-industrial complex often seem to distort our understanding of war, even to reduce it to a sophisticated game played out by high-precision automata. Pick explores both the reassuring and troubling aspects of such representations. Shorn of human agency or responsibility, war apparently threatens to become technologically unstoppable, the remorseless 'perfect abattoir' of the industrial age. War Machine explores the enduring historical fascination with - and recoil from -brutal mechanical slaughter, and the modern aquiescence in, and enthusiasm for (in Rilke's phrase), 'these days of monstrously accelerated dying'.
Author : P. Colomb
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 13,37 MB
Release : 1975
Category :
ISBN : 9780405062827
Author : Antulio J. Echevarria II
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 153 pages
File Size : 32,81 MB
Release : 2007-04-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0313051100
Rapid and momentous technological changes at the turn of the 20th century forced military professionals and educated civilians to envision the future of war and warfare, especially during an age where nations found themselves aggressively competing for dominance on the world stage. Antulio J. Echevarria II offers a comparative study of these predictions to assess who got it right and why. He concludes that professionals were particularly adept at predicting the warfare of the immediate future by framing their discussions in terms of solving tactical problems, but they were much less successful at thinking of the long-term. Unburdened by the necessity of strategic problem-solving, educated amateurs were allowed more flexibility to imagine the long-term future of warfare, and, at times, proved to be remarkably accurate. Echevarria organizes his study by comparing visions of future wars on land, at sea, undersea, and in air. In each instance professionals and amateurs had their own distinctive imaginings. Among the notable speculators included in this book are science fiction author H.G. Wells and military theorist Ivan Bloch. This approach to the study of warfare is one of those rare examples of a book that can appeal to and inform a wide cross-section of readers.
Author : David Christie Murray
Publisher : DigiCat
Page : 38 pages
File Size : 25,30 MB
Release : 2022-09-15
Category : Fiction
ISBN :
'Schwartz' is a novel about the dog who bears the same name as the title of this book and the man who discovered him. The story is told from the perspective of the man, who remained unnamed and stumbled upon Schwartz one day, watching him as he walked pensively round a corner eighty yards down the avenue, and paused to scratch one ear with a hind foot. He stood for a time with a thoughtful air, looked up the avenue and down the avenue, and then with slow deliberation, and an occasional pause for thought, he walked towards the narrator. When within half a dozen yards he stopped and took good stock of me, with brown eyes overhung by thick grizzled eyebrows. Then he offered a short, interrogative, authoritative bark, a mere monosyllable of inquiry.
Author : David Christie Murray
Publisher : DigiCat
Page : 65 pages
File Size : 30,73 MB
Release : 2022-09-15
Category : Fiction
ISBN :
'Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield' is a romance novel by David Christie Murray. The story unfolds in the year eighteen hundred and twenty, where for many years before and after, Abel Reddy farmed his own land at Perry Hall End, on the western boundaries of Castle Barfield. He lived at Perry Hall, a ripe-coloured old tenement of Elizabethan design, which crowned a gentle eminence and looked out picturesquely on all sides from amongst its neighboring trees. It had a sturdier aspect in its age than it could have worn when younger, for its strength had the sign-manual of time upon it, and even its hoary lichens looked as much like a prophecy as a record. A mile away, but also within the boundaries of Castle Barfield parish, there stood another house upon another eminence: a house of older date than Perry Hall, though of less pleasing and picturesque an air. The long low building was of a darkish stone, and had been altered and added to so often that it had at last arrived at a complex ugliness which was not altogether displeasing. The materials for its structure had all been drawn at different periods from the same stone quarry, and the checkered look of new bits and old bits had a hint of the chess-board. Here Samson Mountain dwelt on his own land in the midst of his own people.
Author : H.G. Wells
Publisher : Broadview Press
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 23,2 MB
Release : 2003-03-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1551113538
H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, the first story to speculate about the consequences of aliens (from Mars) with superior technology landing on earth, is one of the most influential science fiction books ever written. The novel is both a thrilling narrative and an elaboration of Wells’s socio-political thought on the subjects of imperialism, humankind’s treatment of other animals, and unquestioning faith in military technology and the continuation of the human species. This edition’s appendices include other related writings by Wells; selected correspondence; contemporary reviews; excerpts from works that influenced the novel and from contemporary invasion narratives; and photographs of examples of Victorian military technology.
Author :
Publisher :
Page : 892 pages
File Size : 11,90 MB
Release : 1896
Category : Art
ISBN :
Author : Brett Holman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 33,52 MB
Release : 2016-02-17
Category : History
ISBN : 1317022637
In the early twentieth century, the new technology of flight changed warfare irrevocably, not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front. As prophesied before 1914, Britain in the First World War was effectively no longer an island, with its cities attacked by Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers in one of the first strategic bombing campaigns. Drawing on prewar ideas about the fragility of modern industrial civilization, some writers now began to argue that the main strategic risk to Britain was not invasion or blockade, but the possibility of a sudden and intense aerial bombardment of London and other cities, which would cause tremendous destruction and massive casualties. The nation would be shattered in a matter of days or weeks, before it could fully mobilize for war. Defeat, decline, and perhaps even extinction, would follow. This theory of the knock-out blow from the air solidified into a consensus during the 1920s and by the 1930s had largely become an orthodoxy, accepted by pacifists and militarists alike. But the devastation feared in 1938 during the Munich Crisis, when gas masks were distributed and hundreds of thousands fled London, was far in excess of the damage wrought by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941, as terrible as that was. The knock-out blow, then, was a myth. But it was a myth with consequences. For the first time, The Next War in the Air reconstructs the concept of the knock-out blow as it was articulated in the public sphere, the reasons why it came to be so widely accepted by both experts and non-experts, and the way it shaped the responses of the British public to some of the great issues facing them in the 1930s, from pacifism to fascism. Drawing on both archival documents and fictional and non-fictional publications from the period between 1908, when aviation was first perceived as a threat to British security, and 1941, when the Blitz ended, and it became clear that no knock-out blow was coming, The Next War in the Air provides a fascinating insight into the origins and evolution of this important cultural and intellectual phenomenon, Britain's fear of the bomber.
