Rawlinson-Mills, Elizabeth; (2021) Bards, priests and prophets: the newspaper poets of the South African War (1899-1902). Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Preview

Text E Rawlinson Mills Bards, Priests and Prophets.pdf Download (34MB) | Preview

Abstract

Hundreds of poems were published in British daily newspapers during the South African War. Serious poets and enthusiastic amateurs, serving soldiers and anonymous correspondents chose newspaper publication, self-consciously assuming a range of public roles. The thesis begins by considering the functions of bard, priest and prophet as alternative models for wartime newspaper poets, who were called upon to contribute to public debates about British character and culture, imperial ambition and international policy. Poems circulated nationally and internationally, and readers responded with performances, parodies, censure and debate, subjecting newspaper poets to political and literary scrutiny. The second section of the thesis is concerned with representations of masculinity and gentlemanliness, showing how poets took on Kipling’s voices and verse forms in order to articulate different visions of military manliness, and thus to proffer alternative ways of conceptualising imperial Britain’s national character. The third section is concerned with representations of the South African landscape, showing how wartime newspaper poets mediated the war to civilian newspaper readers by adapting and subverting tropes of earlier imperial landscape writing, in particular in their representations of war deaths. Meditating on this ultimate intimacy between body and land, poets both perform and moderate imperial anxieties through a cartography of remembering. A short concluding chapter centres on a figure in the metropolitan landscape: the ragged newspaper boy. The newsboy is closely related to Tommy Atkins; but he is also connected, in a number of poems, with the newspaper poet: the bodies – and the contested roles – of the British soldier, the newsboy and the wartime poet coincide. The stereotype of newspaper verse as uniformly patriotic doggerel, compounded by a disciplinary bias against ephemeral and anonymous material, has contributed to critical neglect; this thesis argues that the newspaper poetry of 1899-1902 is an important site of social and literary engagement.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONCSVXML

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Archive Staff Only

View Item