Author ORCID Identifier
Date Available
8-1-2023
Year of Publication
2023
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
English
First Advisor
Dr. Pearl James
Second Advisor
Dr. Jordan Brower
Abstract
Industrialization in 19th-Century America yielded a regrettable by-product: the modernization of warfare. Mass armies, technological innovation, and unprecedented rates of industrial productivity prompted the creation of machines designed to inspire fear, increase destructive capability, and inflict mass-death. The modernization of warfare altered forever the way war was experienced and represented literarily. Authors who attempted to represent the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, as well as World War I, articulated modernized warfare with a disillusionment which stems from the tragically dehumanizing effects of mechanical violence on an industrial scale. Myth, Mockery, & Misery argues that as far back as 1862, romantic idealization no longer seemed a tenable strategy for representing warfare— even in fiction. An examination the Civil War poetry of Herman Melville, Stephen Crane’s Spanish-American War sketches, and Ellen N. La Motte’s World War I memoir, not only pushes the advent of American disillusionment narratives further back on the historical timeline, but in so doing, evinces an aesthetical shift – or evolution – of disillusionment concurrent with the modernization of warfare.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2023.323
Recommended Citation
Halkyard, Richard W., "MYTH, MOCKERY, & MISERY: AN EVOLUTION OF DISILLUSION IN MODERN-WAR EXPRESSION" (2023). Theses and Dissertations--English. 163.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/163
