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"Varying offensives" : American writers' representations of World War I

Over the past thirty years the dominant trend in studies of American World War I literature has been to recognise the plurality of experience represented in American writing connected with the First World War, beyond that registered in the canonical works of white male modernists. Scholars have identified literary representations of the various gendered, political, intellectual, and racial subgroups that were affected by World War I in America. This growing interest in the experiences of diverse socio-political constituencies has, unfortunately, often reductively classified authors as belonging to a particular category of identity. Accordingly, the present work challenges this trend in three distinct ways. I argue, firstly, that individual authors held and represented complex and nuanced responses to the war. I propose, secondly, that writers expressed these views not just in the key works for which they are remembered, but across multiple literary media, including novels, magazine fiction, film scripts, book reviews, history works, prefaces, and autobiographies. Finally, I maintain a focus throughout on the provisionality of authors' responses to the war, arguing that these changed over time as a consequence of authors' intellectual and professional developments.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:731611
Date January 2017
CreatorsRennie, David Alan
PublisherUniversity of Aberdeen
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=233979

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