Discourses Surrounding British Widows of the First World War

Description

Using extensive data - mostly gleaned from the National Archives - this book examines the way in which British widows of servicemen who died in the First World War were represented in society and by themselves, exploring the intertwining discourses of social welfare, national identity, and morality that can be identified in these texts. Focusing on two widows, the book encourages their individual stories to emerge and gives a voice to an otherwise forgotten group of women whose stories have been lost under the literary tomes of middle-class writers such as Vera Brittain and May Wedderburn Cannon. The discussion is further informed by a wider reading of 300 other such files, which allows wider observations to be made about the nature of the discourses examined, and offers the most complete possible picture for such data. Offering a streamlined adaptation of the Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis, Discourses Surrounding British Widows of the First World War demonstrates how this model of analysis can be used to investigate a large body of data from a wide variety of sources, covering a long period of time. As such it will be useful to all scholars in their analysis of historical corpa.

Angela Smith is Reader in Language and Culture at the University of Sunderland, UK. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on media discourses, gender, the portrayal of immigrants and the representation of politicians.

[T]he book offers a fascinating toolkit of concepts and methods, which can be drawn upon to research the fate of this previously neglected population ... this is a stimulating and important book, which will be of use to scholars across a range of disciplines in attempting to understand the nature of loss in wartime. * Mortality *