Witness to war: photography, Anglophone women's writing, and the Spanish Civil War.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20211476

This dissertation connects twentieth-century European and American women artists' documentations of the Spanish Civil War in photography, journalism, memoir, fiction, and poetry to a growing consciousness of humanitarianism in British and American political culture in the 1930s. With attention to a representational strategy called "gendered witnessing," Witness to War unites literary and visual analysis with biographical portraits of non-Spanish women writers and photographers who went to Spain to report, document, and advocate for foreign intervention. The dissertation focuses on seven foreign women of varying nationalities who were in Spain during the war: the Hungarian Kati Horna and the German Gerda Taro, photographers; Americans Martha Gellhorn and Frances Davis, journalists; American Muriel Rukeyser, novelist; and British poets Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland. How these women used visual techniques in their writing and framed the subject in their photography is fundamental to my overarching premise of reading these women's cultural production from the Spanish Civil War as gendered witnessing and helping to craft a human rights discourse. Representations of the Spanish Civil War helped to shape our present-day definition of humanitarianism; the gendered dynamic in the work of the women writers and artists addressed in this project provides us with a new way of viewing not only the Spanish Civil War, but twentieth-century representations of war in general.