Title:
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Feathers and granite: discourse of national identity in memorials to the dead of the 1914-1918 war
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This thesis is an exploration of the memorialisation of the 1914-1918 War in
Britain. It focuses upon memorials to war dead as sites which were exclusively
reserved for carefully sanctioned and specifically negotiated forms of
commemorative activity. War memorials engaged with post-war social space
and manipulated its boundaries in several ways. The study adopts a thematic
perspective to study the conceptualisation of collectivity through the
memorialisation of the war in public places in Britain.
It is structured in four chapters according to each theme, and these are: the
selection of sites, the performance of ceremonies of unveiling, the incising of text
into stone, and the formulation and imaging of bodies. Each theme forms a
component of what is identified as a 'commemorative spatiality' which was
utilised and adapted in the demarcation of communities according to complex
socio-spatial arrangements. The main theoretical approach utilised in this thesis
is the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, who conceptualised space not as a
neural, homogenoeus 'sphere' for human activity, but as socially produced.
Focusing primarily upon six memorials the study scrutinises the way in which
an image of cultural authority, related to ideas about a 'nationally' unified
framework for remembrance, was utilised and adapted by a variety of
communities to structure the commemmoration of the war dead and inevitably
implied other, unassimilated discourses when produced according to the
components of the overaching commemorative spatiality.
The commemoration of the 1914-1918 War was broadly predicated upon the
conceptualisation of communities according to ideas about place and meaning.
It follows that the commemorative spatiality identified in this study has enabled
a comprehensive consideration of the ways in which expressions of national
coherence, or more diverse and fragmented associations were either expressed
or obscured through the production of memorials to war dead.
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