Art And Masculinity In Post War Britain

In this book, Gregory Salter traces how artists represented home and masculinities in the period of social and personal reconstruction after the Second World War in Britain. Salter considers home as an unstable entity at this historical moment, imbued with the optimism and hopes of post-war recovery while continuing to resonate with the memories and traumas of wartime. Artists examined in the book include John Bratby, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan, Francis Newton Souza and Victor Pasmore. Case studies featured range from the nuclear family and the body, to the nation. Combined, they present an argument that art enables an understanding of post-war reconstruction as a temporally unstable, long-term phenomenon which placed conceptions of home and masculinity at the heart of its aims. Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain sheds new light on how the fluid concepts of society, nation, masculinity and home interacted and influenced each other at this critical period in history and will be of interest to anyone studying art history, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural and heritage studies.

With its specific focus on British representations of masculinity in relation to the trauma of the First World War and notions of national identity, class and sexuality, this book provides a much needed addition to the historiography of visual culture during the period. The study interrogates the complications arising out of issues of trauma, cultural expressions of sexuality and affect, as well as the ways in which these are encoded in diverse forms in visual culture and commemorative objects. Concentrating on masculinity and cultural memory, it investigates the ways in which these and the web of power relations that they entail worked during the interwar years in order to reconstruct the post-First World War British society. In the course of the narrative, the author looks at Bolshevism and the Returning Ex-Servicemen, the 1919 NUR Strike, the Central Labour College in conjunction with banners and revolution, as well as the Imperial War Graves, the Cenotaph, the London and North Western Railway memorial, the Machine Gun Corps Memorial and the establishment of the Imperial War Museum. He also excavates new archival material, particularly case studies of shell shock sufferers and film footage of male hysteria.

This book presents an analysis of representations of white, heterosexual, working-class masculinities in British culture between 1945 and 1989 to trace the development of the sociocultural and material conditions that shaped the masculinities which are helping to shape contemporary culture. This book seeks to fan the ‘spark of hope’ in the past that informs our present. The period which saw the establishment of the welfare state and the construction and breakdown of the post-war consensus in British politics was of great significance in the formation and maintenance of working-class masculinities and their correspondent representations. The author engages with a variety of cultural texts across various modes and media including films (Alfie), plays (Don’t Look Back in Anger), television (Boys from the Blackstuff), and music (The Beatles), and employs the analysis of the representation of working-class masculinities as a lens through which to examine a range of historical and cultural moments. This book reinstates class as a central precept in the study of British cultural representations and offers a timely intervention in ongoing debates around class and gender identities in Britain. The book will be key reading for students and researchers with interests in twentieth-century social and cultural British history, masculinities and gender studies, twentieth-century British literature, British television, and cultural studies more broadly.

Analyzing literary texts, plays, films and photographs within a transatlantic framework, this volume explores the inseparable and mutually influential relationship between different forms of national identity in Great Britain and the United States and the construction of masculinity in each country. The contributors take up issues related to how certain kinds of nationally specific masculine identifications are produced, how these change over time, and how literature and other forms of cultural representation eventually question and deconstruct their own myths of masculinity. Focusing on the period from the end of World War II to the 1980s, the essays each take up a topic with particular cultural and historical resonance, whether it is hypermasculinity in early cold war films; the articulation of male anxieties in plays by Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Sam Shepard; the evolution of photographic depictions of masculinity from the 1960s to the 1980s; or the representations of masculinity in the fiction of American and British writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Richard Yates, John Braine, Martin Amis, Evan S. Connell, James Dickey, John Berger, Philip Roth, Frank Chin, and Maxine Hong Kingston. The editors and contributors make a case for the importance of understanding the larger context for the emergence of more pluralistic, culturally differentiated and ultimately transnational masculinities, arguing that it is possible to conceptualize and emphasize difference and commonality simultaneously.

In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.

On consumerism.

Exploring how understandings of masculinity were constructed by British First World war servicemen through examination of their personal narratives, including letters home from the front and wartime diaries. This book presents a nuanced investigation of masculine identity in Britain during and after the First World War.

Home articulates a ‘critical geography of home’ in which home is understood as an emotive place and spatial imaginary that encompasses lived experiences of everyday, domestic life alongside a wider, and often contested, sense of being and belonging in the world. Engaging with the burgeoning cross-disciplinary interest in home since the first edition was published, this significantly revised and updated second edition contains new research boxes, illustrations, and contemporary examples throughout. It also adds a new chapter on ‘Home and the City’ that extends the scalar understanding of home to the urban. The book develops the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of a critical geography of home, drawing on key feminist, postcolonial, and housing thinkers as well as contemporary methodological currents in non-representational thinking and performance. The book’s chapters consider the making and unmaking of home across the domestic scale – house-as-home; the urban – city-as-home; national – nation-as-home; and homemaking in relation to transnational migration and diaspora. Each chapter includes illustrative examples from diverse geographical contexts and historical time periods. Chapters also address some of the key cross-cutting dimensions of home across these scales, including digital connectivity, art and performance, more-than-human constructions of home, and violence and dispossession. The book ends with a research agenda for home in a world of COVID-19. The book provides an understanding of home that has three intersecting dimensions: that material and imaginative geographies of home are closely intertwined; that home, power, and identity are intimately linked; and that geographies of home are multi-scalar. This framework, the examples used to illustrate it, and the intended audience of academics and students across the humanities and social sciences will together shape the field of home studies into the future.