Raising the Dead: Writing Lives and Writing Wars in Britain, 1914--1941.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

<italic>Raising the Dead: Writing Lives and Writing Wars in Britain, 1914-1941</italic> explores connections between life writing and the British experience of the First World War. This dissertation recontextualizes modernist biography and fiction of the Great War era, placing contemporary popular and high literary works and related visual and cultural artifacts into dialogue with one another. I argue that, in the war's aftermath, life writing offered Britons a way to recover the dead and in turn, prompted them to reconsider relationships between individual and national histories as well as the more fundamental relationship between textual representation and meaning.
My first chapter evokes the haunted atmosphere of war-era England. Technological innovation, aesthetic debate, and fascination with the occult were definitive aspects of the war and post-war experience; their conflicts and collaborations are particularly evident in texts and media related to the commemoration of the war dead. Prominent civic monuments and ceremonies suggest destabilized connections between Britons' personal experience of the war's losses and their public representation. In the face of collective, vague, or anonymizing symbolism of the fallen, Spiritualist media of the post-war era claimed to document the return of the individual, ghostly, dead.
My second chapter puts war-era memorial biography into dialogue with Spiritualist 'afterlives' of fallen soldiers. For British mourners, writing the lives of the dead was a way to retrieve unique identities and histories from obscuring nationalist sentiment or public modes of commemoration. I argue that writing the biography of a dead soldier and replacing it within a personal or affective narrative context mirrored the physical exhumation and reburial at home that were impossible during this war. In Spiritualist 'afterlives,' the war dead appear to seek personal recognition, foregrounding individual identities, agency, and affective bonds before less individualized, more publically attuned, representations. Text and other media, furthermore, are upheld as stable facilitators of meaningful communication and reunion between the living and the dead.
Memoirists Vera Brittain, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon struggled to recover in coherent form their own bodies of experience and memory after serving in the First World War. Their texts are the subject of my third chapter. In writing of war and its catastrophic effects, memoirists register their own ghostly position—having lost the solid identities and relationships that defined their past and would have charted their future, and having lost the ability to communicate their traumas and thus relate to or assimilate into a post-war civilian society. Through their testaments of self-diffusion and alienation, memoirists come to terms with broken narratives and identities as well as the prospect of recognizing and representing a multifaceted, composite, selfhood.
My fourth chapter considers modernist biographers seeking to rematerialize Victorian icons whose monumental status seemed to support cultural illusions responsible for conflict and social inequality. Embracing their modern moment, New Biographers regarded newer media like photography and film as realist technologies that could inspire them to render textually a more accurate and believably human subject. Lytton Strachey's New Biographies <italic>Eminent Victorians</italic> and <italic>Queen Victoria</italic>, however, still ponder the complexities of the biographer's perspective on and relationship to his subject. Strachey's New Biography was a point of discussion and creative difference in his friendship with Virginia Woolf. As I discuss, over the course of correspondence from the 1910s and 1920s, the two colleagues consider the boundaries between fiction and biography as well as the access that each generic medium permits to the realistic and the human.
For a major portion of her career, Woolf explored her interest in narrative perspective as it relates to a subject or protagonist's materialization in biography and fiction. My fifth chapter focuses on this exploration. Biography's power to raise to visibility the lives of otherwise obscure individuals—a war's victims or women writers, for example—is an essential support for social equity, Woolf argues in <italic>Three Guineas</italic> and elsewhere. However, in her fiction, from <italic>Night and Day</italic> to <italic>Orlando </italic>, Woolf underscores the problematic formal or representative constraints of biography and the newer media recruited to support modernist life writing. In her novel <italic>Jacob's Room</italic>, Woolf makes the most powerful statement about the fraught relationship between representation and meaning. By introducing a narrative approach that recalls Spiritualist mediumism, Woolf reveals this relationship's implications for the waging of war, the experience of grief, and life writing itself.