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Nick Bentley takes a fresh look at English fiction produced in the 1950s. By looking at a range of authors, he shows that the novel of the period was far more diverse and formally experimental than previous accounts have suggested.
This lively study challenges the myths about apathy and smugness surrounding British literature of the period. It rereads the decade and its literature as crucial in twentieth-century British history for its emergent and increasingly complicated politics
An exploration of how espionage narratives give access to cultural conceptions of gender and sexuality before and following the Second World War, this book moves away from masculinist assumptions of the genre to offer an integrative survey of the sexualities on display from important characters across spy fiction. Topics covered include how authors mocked the traditional spy genre; James Bond as a symbol of pervasive British Superiority still anxious about masculinity; how older female spies act as queer figures that disturb the masculine mythology of the secret agent; and how the clandestine lives of agents described ways to encode queer communities under threat from fascism. Covering texts...
Prosthetic Agency: Literature, Culture and Masculinity after World War II examines the social and psychic upheaval of demobilisation. It maps the rapid transition from wartime regimentation to individual responsibility, from intense homosociality to heteronormative expectations, from normativity to disability and from uniformed masculinity to domestic citizenship. This book considers some of the many ways in which popular culture of the time sought to mediate these difficult transitions, exploring films, popular fiction, memoir and biography. In particular, the book explores how technology was imagined as a new space of masculine becoming and how disability was written, represented and assimilated. Through a focus on popular narrative, this book explores the modes of masculinity promoted as ideally suited to national reconstruction and tries to make sense of a culture of rehabilitation that could not name or know itself as such.
Examines debates central to postwar British culture, showing the pressures of reconstruction and the mutual implication of war and peace.
Challenges the myths about apathy and smugness surrounding British literature of the period. Alice Ferrebe's lively study rereads the decade and its literature as crucial in twentieth-century British history for its emergent and increasingly complicated politics of difference, as ideas about identity, authority and belonging were tested and contested. By placing a diverse selection of texts alongside those of the established canon of Movement and 'Angry' writing, a literary culture of true diversity and depth is brought into view. The volume characterises the 1950s as a time of confrontation with a range of concerns still avidly debated today, including immigration, education, the challenging behaviour of youth, nuclear threat, the post-industrial and post-imperial legacy, a consumerist economy and a feminist movement hampered by the perceivedly comprehensive nature of its recent success. Contrary to Jimmy Porter's defeatist judgement on his era in John Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger, the volume upholds such concerns as 'good, brave causes' indeed.
This edited collection provides a critical forum for scholars to examine the evolution of queer kinship—encompassing the wide range of relationships, both biological and nonbiological, that queer individuals choose (or are compelled) to establish—through its representation in literature over time and across cultural contexts. In particular, the ten essays in this collection utilize close readings, philosophy, and theory to address the following question: How can we conceptualize the nature of queer kinship based on its textual representations? To this end, the essays engage with a diverse array of texts, from Buddhist writing to contemporary song lyrics, French literature from the 17th and 18th centuries to contemporary drama and novels from Sweden, Israel, and the Anglosphere. This broad temporal and geographic scope yields new critical insights into the varied ontologies of queer kinship and highlights the inherent paradoxes and fundamental messiness in queer kinship formations across different times, spaces, and contexts. In doing so, the collection makes a significant and timely contribution to the fields of kinship studies, queer studies, and comparative literature.
This title examines the ways in which the cultural and political role of Scottish writing has changed since the country's successful referendum on national self-rule in 1997.
Tracing the influence of masculinity on fictional form and theme through an era of dizzying social change, this timely new book conducts a close analysis of English novels selected for contrasting definitions of the male gender, from the allegedly Angry Young Men to the contemporary confessions of Nick Hornby. The literary period since 1950 is interpreted as one of intense political and stylistic negotiation by male authors with the gendered subject-positions both of fictional characters and those who read about them.
"Cultural studies, critical theory, poststructuralism, feminist theory, new historicism".