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Hélène Brion's journal, La Lutte féministe, 'organe unique et rigoureusement indépendant du féminisme intégral' is generally thought to have first appeared in February 1919. However, the discovery of four elegantly handwritten manuscript issues of the same journal in the Sylvia Beach archive at Princeton University Library reveals that Brion had launched an earlier version of La Lutte féministe for limited distribution among an inner-circle of pacifist feminist schoolteachers and fellow political travellers barely a week before the Armistice in November 1918. These manuscript issues which are, to the best of my knowledge, single one-off copies, show Brion and her fellow activists urgently mobilizing around issues of suffrage and peace as the war ended. The manuscripts reveal what motivated Brion's initial Lutte féministe project and the progressive shifts in theme, content and presentation of the journals provide a fascinating insight into the popularizing strategies Brion rehearsed ahead of a print version aimed at a wider readership. Previously unpublished transcripts of correspondence and personal testimonies offer illuminating insights into the acrimonious relationship between Brion and the mainstream reformist feminist movement and enable a unique and intimate personal and political profiling of Brion and her entourage. This article not only brings to light these fascinating documents but also gives valuable insight into the evolving modalities of feminist publishing at the end of the First World War. It explains just how unemployed schoolteacher Brion managed to produce, circulate and popularize the journal with virtually no financial support. In addition, the article's examination of editorial choices she made ahead of the print version are revelatory of the proselytizing strategies used by feminists to reach women of the popular classes at a time of great optimism for lasting political and social change.

Political resistance to Fascism in 1930s Europe was often animated by a particular cosmopolitan imaginary. In this article we explore a number of questions concealed within this dynamic. What is the status of language in a space that expands beyond the constraints of the territorial to encompass more mobile allegiances and differently scaled solidarities? Conversely, how does an impulse towards the cosmopolitan turn back to the nation and reframe internal dialogues surrounding the nature of its linguistic constitution? Hannah Arendt's monograph on the nineteenth-century German-Jewish salonnière Rahel Varnhagen, the Czech novelist Karel Čapek's sat^ire on twentieth-century totalitarianism, War with the Newts, and George Orwell's accounts of both the Spanish Civil War and the culture of the English working class, all three written in the mid 1930s, engage with language as it detaches itself from the narrow optics of nationalism and reattaches itself to both a politics of the public and an ethics of friendship beyond the nation-state. That 1936 is the date around which these ideas of language and communication cohere gives them a singular resonance. For these three very different writers, ideas of the cosmopolitan provide not only a potential future for human solidarity, but a means of revisiting the nation itself, at once engaging with its history of linguistic repression and with the danger posed by the sovereign monolingualism of Fascism.

As Andrew Barker has observed (2010), Joseph Roth's Tarabas: Ein Gast auf dieser Erde (1934) 'appears to support the traditional view of Roth as a writer who, when confronted by a cruel present, retreats into a comforting fiction' about the past. Against this view I argue that this tale of sin and penance is a parable of Germany in 1933. Tarabas's redemption suggests the possibility of an end to the history of anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution, of which the Third Reich's nascent reign of terror is but the latest instalment. And yet, in the final chapter of the novel, written from the perspective of 1933, it is the cyclical view of history as eternal return which predominates. In the end, as much as it is a parable of redemption, Tarabas is also simultaneously a novel of warning.

Camus famously declares that 'there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide'. I argue that while Camus finally rejects suicide as a response to the forsakenness of the human condition – both literal suicide and what he calls 'philosophical suicide', the effort to escape the absurd into a hope for meaning – there is actually a form of suicide he embraces without ever directly thematizing it, namely authorial suicide. Camus anticipated by a quarter of a century Roland Barthes's proclamation of the 'death of the author' and Michel Foucault's announcement that the author 'must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing'. Camus leaves the reader with texts that replicate the absurd itself, uncanny, paradoxical, dizzying, with no signposts for understanding – texts like the world itself, 'divested of illusions and lights'. The reader is left to his own resources, without appeal to the author for instruction or consolation, so that he must face 'the heart-rending and marvellous wager of the absurd' and compose his own response.