Identifier

etd-0326103-111214

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

"Above the Noise and the Glory:" Tiers of Propaganda in Great War Literature illuminates the literary responses of Rupert Brooke, Mary Borden, Alice-Dunbar Nelson and Willa Cather to the manner in which the threat to one's cultural community, as well as personal and physical landscape, transforms a nation's, and even a world's, people from a state of complacency or purposelessness to one of jingoistic fervor. Prompted and inspired by personal, political and cultural forces, these writers mobilized early twentieth-century private citizens' spirits of nationalistic pride and solidarity. Individual chapters place within historical and literary contexts how war propaganda, particularly British and American propaganda from 1914 to 1919, is composed of four stages, each stage choreographed to produce a certain response within the individual. Brooke, Borden, Dunbar-Nelson and Cather, through their writing and active involvement both on the war and home fronts, enter the domain of war in all four stages of the propaganda cycles constructed herein by superimposing a domestic landscape onto a military landscape. In individually defining as well as responding to modes of propaganda, which originated in World War I, but still persist today, these writers are vital to our understanding of how literature not only reflects our history, but shapes it as well.

Date

2003

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

John R. May

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.3342

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