The Laughing Dove examines the key role that satire often plays in anti-war rhetoric, and on the flipside, the way in which the ideological crises accompanying war can transform satiric literary and visual forms.
My current research centers in the 19th century United States, which presents a uniquely suitable habitat for laughing doves because here satire exerts a cultural influence equal or greater to what it had in the British “golden age” running from Butler to Swift to Byron. In this “silver age” of satire, U.S. anti-war movements largely fronted by coastal urban elites turn to satire as a way to refute imputations that they are effeminate, senile, wet blankets out of touch with the vision of national destiny celebrated in populist pro-war propaganda. My focus on rhetorical strategy has acquainted me with all sorts of long-forgotten but nevertheless fascinating writers and artists and given me a new perspective on the position of canonical figures like Irving, Melville, Nast, and Twain within the creative chaos of 19th century U.S. print culture.
At the risk of oversimplifying the highly contextual meanings of the terms “war” and “satire,” I hope this site can go beyond the narrow confines of my dissertation project by encouraging discussion of the laughing dove as a wider historical and cross-cultural phenomenon and as a strategy for contemporary anti-war activism.
