Graduation Year
2014
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.A.
Degree Name
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Degree Granting Department
Mass Communication
Major Professor
Roxanne Watson, Ph.D.
Co-Major Professor
Justin Brown, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Justin Brown, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Scott Liu, Ph.D.
Keywords
Arthurian legend, British history, Chivalry, Rhetoric, Tennyson
Abstract
This study uses Winston Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" speech, delivered to the House of Commons following the evacuation of Dunkirk, France in June 1940, as a source text by which to examine Churchill's use of British cultural narratives in political communication. Narrative and heuristic theories are proposed as means by which listeners process such messages. A number of rhetorical devices are defined, in order to inform a discussion of the narratives identified, particularly the means by which those narratives were rhetorically embedded in the text. After a careful examination of the source text, the narratives of knighthood and chivalric values, as well as King Arthur and the Arthurian legend, specifically as presented in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, were identified as primary cultural narratives from which Churchill draws much meaning. A thorough critical history of each of these narratives is undertaken, revealing sentiments of oath-bound civic duty tracing back to Britain's historical founding as a culture and a nation, following the fall of Rome in the fifth century, and persisting up until Churchill's use of those sentiments in his historic 1940 speech.
Scholar Commons Citation
Faza, Andres L., "British Cultural Narrative in Winston Churchill's Political Communication" (2014). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/5421
