“Fairies and Fusiliers”: Warfare and Faerie on the Western Front
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Authors
Mangoutas, Anastasia-Irene
Date
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
First World War , Great War , Faerie , Fairy tale , Modernism , British fiction , Fantasy , Tolkien , Brittain , Carter , Byatt
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Abstract
This doctoral project addresses the strange meeting between warfare and Faerie in Modernist and contemporary British literature about the First World War. Through a study of four texts, two from survivors of the Great War, two from writers who “did not experience the War, but who inherited its myth” (Hynes A War Imagined xii), this dissertation examines the intersections be-tween faery tale and war story as narratological frameworks, through which these writers attempt to articulate ineffable experiences in the “Perilous Realm[s]” (Tolkien “On Fairy-Stories” 114) of the Western Front and of Faerie. This project traces these intersections, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s short story “The Fall of Gondolin” (1917) and Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth (1933) to Angela Carter’s faery tale “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979) and A.S. Byatt’s historical novel The Children’s Book (2009). Each of the four chapters addresses one of these texts relative to three key strands of enquiry: first, the ways in which the text narrativizes the historical events of the Great War through a Faerie framework; second, the pervasive and sustained nostalgia for a lost Arcadia, which is often interchangeable with Faerie in the collective childhood memories of the War Generation; and third, the pervasive figure of eternal youth that haunts each text, as the spectre of the fallen young men who “shall grow not old” (Binyon “Fallen” 13): a Peter Pan in khaki, that unifies warfare and Faerie in the haunting figure of the boy-soldier. This project con-tributes to the field of literary criticism on the Great War by addressing an often overlooked, yet frequently recurring, theme: the intrusion of Faerie on the seemingly quotidian space of the battlefield and the uncanny similarities between the monsters of the Faerie realm and the monstrous machinery of the Front.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.