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Winston Churchill’s The Second World War : metanarrative, markets, and the politics of memory

University of British Columbia

The potency of memoirs to shape collective memory makes it important to seek a critical understanding of their political and historical functions. Memoirs offer insights into the character, motives, and influence of political leaders, yet many scholars question this genre's ability to produce accurate history, insightful political analysis, or literature of merit. However, to the extent that memoirs contribute to our knowledge and understanding of the past they deserve closer study. Memoirs mediate remembrance of the recent past by functioning primarily in the interval between contemporary political discourse and professional historiography, where their reception molds historical memory. This study assesses how the past is remembered, and the political influences embedded in memory that shape collective identities, through a study of Winston Churchill's metanarrative of the second world war, produced at a critical period in war memory formation. Exposing the politicized aspects of social memory requires examining the means by which private memories are transmitted into the public realm of collective consciousness. In the early postwar era, the dominant transmitter of war memory was the political press, which responded to war narratives by amplifying, dramatizing, or challenging their underlying political messages. Thus, we examine how Churchill's metanarrative of war was produced and promoted by his publishing syndicate, and how his messages were received by the political press and general reading public in Britain and America. After 1945, the main stimuli for contested political memory arose from widespread fears over security, freedom, rapid social change, and historical discontinuity caused by the war. Churchill's metanarrative of legitimation offered an explanation of the traumatic past that contained conservative lessons for political culture. His messages fused an abiding faith in the righteousness of imperial memory with a sense of historical destiny that linked the English-speaking peoples in a common cause to resist totalitarian challenges in the 20th century. Their reception reveals that imperial memory and the archaic language of redemption through war did not end with the first or second world wars, but gained a renewed sense of relevancy and power during the early cold war era.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-09-22

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/12932

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