Prosthetic Agency - Literature, Culture and Masculinity After World War II

"This book addresses the legacy of World War II on male identity and reinvention. It 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"--

List of contents

Introduction; Part I. Technology: 1. Enabling machines: Hammond Innes, Nevil Shute and technologies of rehabilitation; 2. Cinema in the sky: risk, responsibility and domestic citizenship; 3. Bad science: Nigel Balchin and the limits of technological man-making; Part II. Disability: 4. Writing rehabilitation: prosthetic autobiography and self-(re)invention; 5. Unrepresentable wounds? Nevil Shute, Hammond Innes and the legacies of damage; 6. A 'machine genius of the new aerial art': imagining Douglas Bader; Coda: of pigs and men.

About the author

Gill Plain is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews and has published extensively on war writing, mid-century British literature and film, popular culture and gender. Her books include Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2001), John Mills and British Cinema (2006), Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and 'Peace' (2013) and, as editor, British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960 (2018).

Summary

This book addresses the legacy of World War II on male identity and reinvention. It 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.

Product details

• Authors: Gill Plain, Gill (University of St Andrews Plain, Plain Gill
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2023
• EAN: 9781316513200
• ISBN: 978-1-316-51320-0
• No. of pages: 300
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; English, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Men's Studies, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Later 20th century c 1950 to c 1999, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Gender studies: men and boys, Film Theory & Criticism, Gender Studies: Men, c 1945 to c 2000 (Post-war period), Film history, theory or criticism