Prosthetic Agency: Literature, Culture and Masculinity after World War II

ISBN-13: 9781316513200 / Angielski

Gill Plain

Opis

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.

Recenzje

Prosthetic Agency bursts with insight. To call this book a tour de force would be to understate its accomplishment. From the smallest detail to the largest structural organization, the argument about the prosthetic nature of masculinity after the Second World War is handled with magisterial perceptiveness. Gill Plain dextrously weaves together examples from literature and film, and her analysis is all the more valuable for its comprehensive engagement with both media in the 1940s and 1950s. Prosthetic Agency sets a new standard for writing about war, recovery, and masculinity in British studies. Allan Hepburn, McGill University

Spis treści

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.