‘These people know what they're fighting for’: Denis Johnston and the Partisans

Woodward, Guy

doi:10.3366/iur.2018.0358

‘These people know what they're fighting for’: Denis Johnston and the Partisans

Woodward, Guy

Authors

Dr Guy Woodward guy.t.woodward@durham.ac.uk
Research Associate

Abstract

In March 1944 the dramatist and BBC radio correspondent Denis Johnston travelled to the Croatian island of Vis, to record spoken and sung contributions by Yugoslav Partisans and British Royal Air Force officers stationed there. Examining Johnston's wartime memoir Nine Rivers From Jordan alongside his broadcasts, manuscripts and notebooks, this essay considers the visit as a moment of imaginative liberation and escape, made possible both by Vis's utopian status as an island free from Nazi occupation and by the egalitarian social environment that he found there. Johnston's accounts are not entirely celebratory however, and the register of escape is complicated by the affinities he detects between the landscape of Vis and that of the West of Ireland, and between the communist Partisans and Irish Republicans.

Citation

Woodward, G. (2018). ‘These people know what they're fighting for’: Denis Johnston and the Partisans. Irish University Review, 48(2), 331-347. https://doi.org/10.3366/iur.2018.0358

Journal Article Type	Article
Online Publication Date	Oct 31, 2018
Publication Date	Nov 1, 2018
Deposit Date	Oct 17, 2018
Publicly Available Date	Nov 8, 2018
Journal	Irish University Review
Print ISSN	0021-1427
Electronic ISSN	2047-2153
Publisher	Edinburgh University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	48
Issue	2
Pages	331-347
DOI	https://doi.org/10.3366/iur.2018.0358

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Copyright Statement
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Irish University Review. The Version of Record is available online at: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/iur.2018.0358.