Chapter 7 - Literature and Wartime Propaganda

Summary

The period between 1900 and 1920 witnessed several important developments in the production and dissemination of wartime propaganda. Most important among these developments were the rise of the popular press, the expansion of mass literacy, and the increasing centralisation of propaganda efforts as a responsibilty of central government. This chapter traces the development of propaganda methods and of literature’s complicated entanglement with propaganda from the Boer War to the aftermath of the First World War. It describes how a number of major writers – Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells – came to play important roles in the British state’s wartime communications, and how the culture of ‘suspicious reading’ encouraged by the prevalence of propaganda shaped post-war debates about the truth-telling capacities of the literary realism with which those writers were closely associated.