Author's Department/Program
English and American Literature
Language
English (en)
Date of Award
January 2011
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Chair and Committee
Marina MacKay
Abstract
Although indebted to scholars whose work has illuminated the distinctiveness of 1930s Britain, "National History and the Novel in 1930s Britain" argues that rather than seeking distinction, writers of the period were more concerned with the task of contextualizing their decade and their own position within a national historiography from which they felt the Great War and military masculinities had excluded them. Focusing on the novelists Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf, and the philosopher of history, R. G. Collingwood, I describe how the 1930s inheritors of British cultural privilege found themselves symbolically disenfranchised from a national identity inextricably linked to war, imagining alternative national stories outside the prevailing imperial and military mythologies.
Recommended Citation
Delsandro, Erica, "National History and the Novel in 1930s Britain" (2011). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 85.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/85
Comments
Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7VD6WJB