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Embattled Homefronts: Politics and Representation in American World War I Novels

Piep, Karsten H.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1109634736

Abstract Details

2005, Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, English.
This dissertation examines both canonized and marginalized American World War I novels within the context of socio-political debates over shifting class, gender, and race relations. The study contends that American literary representations of the Great War are shaped less by universal insights into modern society's self-destructiveness than by concerted and often highly conflicted efforts to fashion class-, gender-, and race-specific experiences of industrial warfare in ways that create, stabilize, or heighten particular group identities. In moving beyond the customary focus on ironic war representations, Embattled Homefronts endeavors to show that the representational and ideological battles fought within the diverse body of American World War I literature not only shed light on the emergence of powerful identity-political concepts such as the "New Liberal," the "New Proletariat," the "New Woman, and the "New Negro," but also speak to the reappearance of utopian, communitarian, and social protest fictions in the early 1930s. Chapter two investigates how John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms adapt elements of the protest novel so as to revalidate (neo)romantic ideas of bourgeois individualism vis-à-vis the presumed failures of the progressive movement. Chapter three scrutinizes the ways in which two Proletarian war novels-Upton Sinclair's Jimmie Higgins and William Cunningham's The Green Corn Rebellion-utilize the Bildungsroman genre in an attempt to commemorate the battles fought by and within the American laboring classes for revolutionary purposes. Chapter four investigates how Dorothy Canfield Fisher' Home Fires in France and Gertrude Atherton's The White Morning heighten and exploit war-induced notions of an "apotheosis of femaleness" by combining older motifs of female-centered communities with images of the emergent "New Woman." Lastly, taking a close look at Sarah Lee Brown Fleming's Hope's Highway and Walter F. White's The Fire in the Flint, chapter five demonstrates that African American Great War writings transcend the confines of mere protest fiction by adapting conventions of the historical romance so as to create exemplary black protagonists, whose dedication to racial self-improvement, communal work, and heroic resistance mark them as standard bearers of the American democratic ideal.
Rodrigo Lazo (Advisor)
287 p.
Literature, American
American Literature; Literature and War; World War, 1914-1918; Women and World War I; African Americans and World War I; Labor and World War I; Liberalism and World War I; Bildungsroman; Utopia; Protest Fiction; Historical Romance; Modernism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Piep, K. H. (2005). Embattled Homefronts: Politics and Representation in American World War I Novels [Doctoral dissertation, Miami University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1109634736

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Piep, Karsten. Embattled Homefronts: Politics and Representation in American World War I Novels. 2005. Miami University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1109634736.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Piep, Karsten. "Embattled Homefronts: Politics and Representation in American World War I Novels." Doctoral dissertation, Miami University, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1109634736

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

miami1109634736
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© 2004, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Miami University and OhioLINK.