Bøger af Samuel Hynes

The vivid story of the young Americans who fought and died in the aerial battles of World War I.Samuel Hynes's The Unsubstantial Air is a chronicle of war that is more than a military history; it traces the lives and deaths of the young Americans who fought in the skies over Europe in World War I. Using letters, journals, and memoirs, it speaks in their voices and answers primal questions: What was it like to be there? What was it like to fly those planes, to fight, to kill? The volunteer fliers were often privileged young men-the sort of college athletes and Ivy League students who might appear in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and sometimes did. For them, a war in the air would be like a college reunion. Others were roughnecks from farms and ranches, for whom it would all be strange. Together they would make one Air Service and fight one bitter, costly war.A wartime pilot himself, the memoirist and critic Samuel Hynes tells these young men's saga as the story of a generation. He shows how they dreamed of adventure and glory, and how they learned the realities of a pilot's life, the hardships and the danger, and how they came to know both the beauty of flight and the constant presence of death. They gasp in wonder at the world seen from a plane, struggle to keep their hands from freezing in open-air cockpits, party with actresses and aristocrats, and search for their friends' bodies on the battlefield. Their romantic war becomes more than that-it becomes a harsh but often thrilling new reality.

Retired fighter pilot and English professor combines lifelong interests in war and literature in essays on how writers struggled to comprehend warfare.

The pattern in Hardy's poetry is the eternal conflict between irreconcilables that was, for him, the first principle, and indeed the only principle, of universal order. Hynes analyzes this pattern as it is manifested in the philosophical context of the poems, their structure, diction, and imagery. Originally published in 1961.

Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s the First World War opens like a gap in time.

Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters: Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors.

This is a study of a literary generation writing in a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. For those who came of literary age - Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, Graham Greene, Isherwood and Orwell among them - writing became a form of action.