English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Ralph Fox was killed in action against the Spanish rebels and their Fascist allies.. .. We shall honour his memory best, and that of the other fallen comrades, by redoubling our efforts on behalf of the Spanish people.' This Left Review obituary for Ralph Fox, killed at the age of 37 on the Cordova Front in Spain, reflected the close integration between radical politics, revolutionary writers, and identification with the Republican Spanish cause in the 1930s. Support for the fledgling leftist and democratically elected Popular Front government against the Franco Nationalist rebellion was an issue over which an otherwise divided British left could unite. Yet despite the almost uniform support for intervention advocated by leftist intellectuals, to the British government the conflict was merely an anachronistic Latin quarrel in which it was best not to meddle. Participation in the militias became a political statement not only against Fascism, but also against the apathetic stance of Western governments. Approximately 2 700 volunteers from Britain defied the official "non-intervention" policy that rendered their participation illegal. Left-leaning literary journals, novels, and political pamphlets presented the conflict as the Writer's or Poet's War, a struggle in which culture was intimately involved. Stephen Spender, an observer and participant, labelled it as such and later commentators, such as literary historian Margot Heinemann and Frederick R. Benson in Writers in Arms, proved powerful carriers of this romanticized n~tion.~ The Last Great Cause, a work written during the political upheaval of the late 1960s, is a similarly dramatic title for an event seen in apocalyptic terms by its intellectual participant^.^ The fact that Spain was hardly a "Poet's War," and that at least 80 percent of British volunteers were working class, does not diminish the Spanish Civil War as an event of primary importance to leftist intellectuals seeking to legitimate their political credibility. The builders of this entrenched myth, many of whom, like Heinemann, were deeply committed to the cause, have constructed the narrative of the Just War, which has served as a rich field for recent historians to explore issues of leftist politics, culture, masculinity, and heroism. This article considers the close-knit community around the Communist writers and intellectuals of the Writers' International and Left Review from 1934-1938, and how their participation in political and armed opposition to

Writers in Arms and the Just War: The Spanish Civil War, Literary Activism, and Leftist Masculinity