British Cultural Narrative in Winston Churchill\u27s Political Communication

This study uses Winston Churchill\u27s 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\u27s 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\u27s 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\u27s historical founding as a culture and a nation, following the fall of Rome in the fifth century, and persisting up until Churchill\u27s use of those sentiments in his historic 1940 speech