Remembering the First World War on the British Stage 1919-1939

该项目将首次持续评估英国戏剧如何纪念1919年至1939年之间的大战。它将争辩说，在回应战争的历史，文化和心理上的一致性，并在目睹其持久的影响，戏剧塑造和激励长期存在的辩论，关于如何纪念死者，以及如何影响个人和国家重建的过程。该项目的主要关注点是展示关于适当纪念形式的持续辩证法和讲述战争“真相”的信念如何产生了一系列代表广泛社会，政治和性别观点的作品。在这一点上，它将提供一个必要的重新评估当前的学术，在忽视或低估语料库的重要方面，误解了战争记忆的恢复和工具化的方式。通过详细描述缺失的叙事、身体和精神疾病对退伍军人及其家人的影响、妇女的战争角色、德国的战争经历、和平政治、国际主义和和平主义--我的项目将展示两次世界大战之间剧作家如何协商纪念战争损失并承认其成就的必要性，与此同时，我们也在不断变化的需求中发言。通过描绘这些关注在整个时期的波动，体裁可以更精确地与两次世界大战期间的非戏剧性写作研究保持一致（Einhaus 2013，Frayn 2014）。该项目的发展源于我对两次世界大战期间作家如何表达他们的战争经历及其后果的长期兴趣。受我的UGRS项目的启发，谢里夫的旅程的结束和相关的戏剧，如懦夫的验尸，我研究了反应的戏剧和生活写作的20世纪20年代和30年代初的战争在三个最后一年的模块。所有涉及档案研究-在伯明翰，大英图书馆和帝国战争博物馆-和所有三个贡献一流的马克，我的整体第一。在MA水平，我在现代主义和出版史的论文，并在玫瑰麦考利（1881年至1958年）的小说，包括她的和平主义小说非战斗人员和其他人（1916年）的论文期间扩展这些利益。这种研究经验，由MA研究技能模块的支持，再加上我对两次世界大战期间的知识，使我处于有利地位，在时间表内完成一个有价值的博士项目。

This project will offer the first sustained assessment of how English theatre remembered the Great War between 1919 and 1939. It will argue that in responding to the historical, cultural and psychological enormity of the war, and in witnessing its lasting impact, drama shaped and energised long standing debates about how to honour the dead and how to effect the process of individual and national reconstruction. The project's primary concern is to show how an ongoing dialectic about appropriate forms of memorialisation and a conviction to tell the 'truth' about the war gave rise to a body of work representing a wide range of social, political and gendered perspectives. In this it will provide a necessary revaluation of current scholarship which, in neglecting or underplaying significant aspects of the corpus, misapprehends the ways in which the memory of the war was recovered and instrumentalised. By offering a detailed account of missing narratives, the impact of physical and mental illness upon veterans and their families, women's war roles, the German experience of the war, the politics of peace, internationalism, and pacifism - my project will show how inter-war playwrights negotiated the imperative to commemorate the losses of the war, and to acknowledge its achievements, whilst speaking to the changing needs of the present. By mapping how these concerns fluctuated throughout the period, the genre can be more precisely aligned with studies of non-dramatic writing of the interwar period (Einhaus 2013, Frayn 2014).The project has developed out of my longstanding interest in how writers of the interwar period represented their experiences of war and its aftermath. Inspired by my UGRS project on the reception of Sherriff's Journey's End and related plays such as Coward's Post-Mortem, I studied responses to the war in drama and life writing of the 1920s and early 1930s in three final-year modules. All involved archiva research - at Birmingham, the British Library and the Imperial War Museum - and all three contributed first class marks to my overall First. At MA level I am extending these interests in the period with essays on modernism and publishing history, and a Dissertation on the fiction of Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), including her pacifist novel Non-Combatants and Others (1916). This research experience, supported by the MA Research Skills module and coupled with my knowledge of the interwar period, puts me in a strong position to complete a valuable doctoral project within schedule.