Prosthetic Agency
Literature, Culture and Masculinity after World War II
Published on 13. July 2023
Book
Hardback
290 pages
978-1-316-51320-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
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 UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
594 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-316-51320-0 (9781316513200)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
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).
Content
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.