Songs of War: Anglo-Canadian Popular Songs on the Home Front, 1914-1918

This article explores the production, content, and reception of Anglo-Canadian popular songs composed during the First World War. It argues that popular songs reflected the changing attitudes of Anglo-Canadians, as composers and publishers created music to fulfill different purposes for those on the home front at various stages of the war. In the beginning, the majority of songs were patriotic marches composed to gather support for Britain and the Empire. As the war continued, there was an increase in the number of patriotic songs that expressed a growing sense of wartime Canadian nationalism to enlist recruits. Throughout the war, music was significant to the First World War experience on Canada’s home front

The Search for Values: Young Adults and the Literary Experience

published or submitted for publicatio

'Splendid display; pompous spectacle': historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain

This article examines the organisation, nature and content of historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on four pageants at St Albans, Hertfordshire – in 1907, 1948, 1953 and 1968 – it considers the selection of historical episodes that were depicted, the role that pageants played in the life of the community, and the ways in which the relationship between past and present was presented. Pageants functioned as both education and entertainment, and were significant events in the creation of the public image of the city, although they could also provoke local controversy and dissent. They promoted a strongly local sense of identity, and civic pride was perhaps even more important to the post-war pageants than to those staged in the Edwardian period, as communities such as St Albans negotiated a period of rapid development and change in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the large-scale civic pageant that characterised the first half of the twentieth century rapidly declined in the late 1950s and early 1960s, proving less adaptable in the context of the cultural upheavals of the period. Subsequent pageants were on a much smaller scale than those that were staged before the mid-1950s, and adopted a different attitude to the national and local past

The Phenomenology of Ritual Resistance: Colin Kaepernick as Confucian Sage

In 2016, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, remained seated during the national anthem in order to protest racial injustice and police brutality against African-Americans. After consulting with National Football League and military veteran Nate Boyer, Kaepernick switched to taking a knee during the anthem for the remainder of the season. Several NFL players and other professional athletes subsequently adopted this gesture. This article brings together complementary Confucian and phenomenological analyses to elucidate the significance of Kaepernick’s gesture, and in the process provide a phenomenological characterization of the connection between the Confucian notions of sagehood and ritual. Kaepernick’s gesture subverts the anthem ritual from within while simultaneously remaining faithful to the ideals it is meant to express. Furthermore, it institutes a new bodily form of patriotic self-expression compatible with both American and Confucian ideals

(Tory) anarchy in the UK: The very peculiar practice of tory anarchism

The idea of ‘Tory Anarchism’ is reasonably well known but largely unanalysed in either popular or academic literature. Tory Anarchism refers to a group of apparently disparate figures in English popular and political culture whose work has, in part, satirised key British institutions and social relations. At the same time they also provide interesting insights into questions of British, though predominantly English, identity, by focusing upon issues of class, empire and nation. This article examines tory anarchism by focusing upon four representative figures: Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Peter Cook and Chris Morris