| This dissertation examines the way war hysteria changes accepted standards of sanity. Paranoia, gossip, rumor, and informing on neighbors become expected forms of behavior and dominant literary tropes during wartime. World War I literature reflects this confusion on the home front as clearly as it reflects the front line's "peculiar sanity," a phrase Joseph Conrad uses in his 1905 essay "Autocracy and War." Extending Michel Foucault's discussion of the construction of madness and reason, my study expands the definition of war neurosis to include peculiar sanity at home as well as on the front line.; While other investigations of World War I delve into shell shock as the only definable war madness, this study ultimately questions the sanity of socially sanctioned behavior, of war mania. It begins by examining the roots of war mania in pre-war conventions and hypocrisies, and continues by looking at the way propaganda operates in non-traditional texts such as housekeeping guides, official accounts of war atrocities, and other propaganda publications. These non-traditional texts generate a series of literary tropes which appear in the works I am considering, among them Ford's Parade's End, Wells's Mr. Britling Sees It Through, and Cather's One of Ours. In addition, I have drawn on historical and personal accounts of the war such as Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That and Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, as well as medical texts of the day, such as Edwin Ash's The Problem of Nervous Breakdown .; The primary aim of this study then, is to reexamine assumptions about commonplace and daily involvement in the Great War. Using the concept of peculiar sanity as a model, I will examine those patterns of behavior, both historical and literary, which at any other time would be deemed inappropriate, illogical, or antisocial-patterns of behavior which during war establish the boundaries of sanity. To illustrate peculiar sanity, I will focus on propaganda, rumor, jingoism, yellow journalism, paranoia, and romanticism. Within this subjective context where definitions are inverted, I will consider shell shock an appropriate or logical response. |
