Impressions of war : the private propaganda of Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
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2018
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Massey University
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Abstract
In this thesis I will explore the relationship between modernist fiction, the world wars,
and British war propaganda, with its foundational distinction between soldier and civilian
experience. This exploration will focus on the novels of two modernist authors who seem to
fall on either side of this distinction: Ford Madox Ford, a soldier, veteran, and propagandist,
and Virginia Woolf, a self-proclaimed anti-war civilian. Existing scholarship on Ford and
Woolf has served to reinforce British war propaganda’s guiding distinction between
experience on the war front and the home front by examining Woolf as an apolitical female
civilian and Ford as a conventional soldier writer. However, this binary fails to acknowledge
the full spectrum of war experience, which unfolds both on the front and at home in similar
ways, resonating in the lives of both soldier and civilian figures within and beyond fiction.
This thesis examines these resonances and challenges existing critical accounts of
Ford and Woolf through a comparative representational analysis of Ford’s The Good
Soldier (1915) and Parade’s End (1924-28), and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Between
the Acts (1941), revealing that these novels challenge the state-sanctioned opposition between
soldier and civilian experiences. Through the analysis of three “formal-experiential
constellations” central to these novels—cyclical temporality, fragmentation, and stream of
consciousness—I will argue that Ford and Woolf’s fictional representations of war
experience, and the modernist devices they use to capture these experiences, serve both to
evoke the lived experience of war, and to undermine the false propagandist model of war
experience. Together, these devices communicate a model of war experience that more
closely aligns with a lived experience that is often cyclical, fragmentary, and intersubjective.
In this process they create a pluralistic, shared, and distinctly modernist vision of war: a kind
of private propaganda.
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Ford, Ford Madox, 1873-1939, Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941, Criticism and interpretation, English fiction, 20th century, History and criticism, War and literature, England, World War, 1914-1918, World War, 1939-1945, Literature and the war, War in literature