Dr Angela Smith has published Discourses Surrounding British Widows of the First World War (Bloomsbury, 2012). The book develops a
stream-lined version of the discourse-historical model of critical
discourse analysis, and demonstrates how this can be used to handle a large corpus of mixed-text data. Drawing mainly on
recently-released records held in the National Archive, Angela explores
the discourses which surround British widows of the First World War with
particular attention to national identity, social welfare and morality. Focusing on two widows, the book encourages their individual stories to emerge and gives a voice to an otherwise forgotten group of women whose
stories have been lost under the literary tomes of middle-class writers
such as Vera Brittain and May Wedderburn Cannon. The discussion is
further informed by a wider reading of 300 other such files, which
allows wider observations to be made about the nature of the discourses
examined, and offers the most complete possible picture for such data.
