This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Trace: Ten... more This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact
Many universities are striving to internationalise, each with its own rationale. To benefit stud... more Many universities are striving to internationalise, each with its own rationale. To benefit students, these efforts must go beyond the recruitment of international students and the development of transnational education, even though these bring their own fiscal and cultural rewards. Here we examine the value of the other strands of the international agenda – student and staff exchange and internationalising the curriculum – as the aspects that most directly benefit the student experience.
was the fundamental weapon in the class struggle” for workers and for women (p. 128). Even more t... more was the fundamental weapon in the class struggle” for workers and for women (p. 128). Even more than claims for women’s public engagement, Arkinstall argues that López de Ayala’s work, including her dramas and novels, was characterized by an insistence that “any transformation of the national body into a viable democracy depends on concomitant reforms in the domestic sphere, unseating patriarchal power, and addressing women’s position within civil society” (p. 101). Sárraga, also a journalist and charismatic speaker, was active on an international scale, carrying messages of republicanism and feminism to Portugal, Argentina, Chile, and North Africa, as well as attending international conferences of freethinkers in Paris, Geneva, and Rome. Arkinstall highlights the feminist dimension of her contributions to one of these major conferences in Geneva, demonstrating that “for Sárraga women’s rights pertain not only to their sex but, more especially, to the nation as a whole” (p. 161). In...
Contemporary study of literary masculinities is under pinned by a founding assumption: that the s... more Contemporary study of literary masculinities is under pinned by a founding assumption: that the specificity of male gender constructions and experience is initially, and tactically, hidden beneath the textual surface. Antony Easthope began the influential What A Man’s Gotta Do with a claim that, ‘despite all that has been written over the past twenty years on femininity and feminism, masculinity has stayed pretty well concealed. This has always been its ruse to hold on to its power’ (Easthope 1990: 1). At Liverpool John Moores University, an important part of our work on the gender-based English modules is engaged with uncovering the (male) gendered particularity of purportedly ‘universal’ themes, in the man-making experiments of Victor Frankenstein, for example, and the contemporary parables of Ian McEwan. In the 1997 article ‘Integrating Men Into the Curriculum’, Michael Kimmel, himself a founding father of the contemporary paradigm of masculinity studies, has traced a similar blind-spot in teaching as well as textual processes, remarking of the ‘educational endeavour’ that ‘at every moment in the process, men are invisible’. They are invisible, he claims, ‘as men’ (Kimmel 1996: 181): that is, as men involved in a complex negotiation and performance of gender. It is, of course, precisely this failure to see the dynamics of masculinity at work in teaching and its designated texts that this volume seeks to redress.
British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960: Postwar, 2018
From the establishment of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 194... more From the establishment of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 1940, cultural regeneration was anticipated as a vital part of the reconstruction of Britain. The means of achieving this rejuvenation, however, remained conflicted once the Second World War was over. Although innovation was, as ever, an artistic priority, the pull of pre-war class and aesthetic certainties was also strong: to Norman Mackenzie, postwar Britain was in a ‘stalemate state, that curious interval in our social history, in which there was no way back to the world which had gutted out into war yet no clear way forward to a really new society’.1 Before the war began, Georg Lukács had attempted to move the debate around art’s social contract beyond the presiding battle-lines. Its terms, he claimed in a 1938 essay, ‘are not classics versus modernists; discussion must focus instead on the question: which are the progressive trends in the literature of today?’ He added: ‘It is the fate...
Popular iconography of the 1960s in Britain immortalises a decade triumphant in its counter-cultu... more Popular iconography of the 1960s in Britain immortalises a decade triumphant in its counter-culture, a sustained rebellion with effects more far-reaching and far more real than the conservative rantings of the Angries and the Outsiders of the English of the fifties. As Alan Sinfield puts it in Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, ‘the “1960s” is of course a myth; but that is an important thing to be, since what we think and do depends on the stories we tell ourselves’ (283). We are encouraged to retain a dominant fiction of an era liberated by satire, chemical stimulants and contraception, its audaciously won freedoms enshrined in the national culture by a rush of liberal legal reforms at the end of the decade.1 Paul Johnson’s farewell editorial for New Statesman on 26 June 1970 serves as a summation of the achievements of the period: ‘We no longer terrorise homosexuals. We do not force mothers to bring unwanted children into the world. We have made it easier to end ...
‘Existentialism is an attempt at philosophizing from the standpoint of the actor instead of as ha... more ‘Existentialism is an attempt at philosophizing from the standpoint of the actor instead of as has been customary, from that of the spectator’: so reads E. L. Allen’s attempt to ‘hazard a definition of existentialism in a sentence’ in his 1953 Existentialism from Within (3). Simplistic though this might be, it does prompt an immediate recognition of the potentially radical implications for the influence of existentialism upon the masculine definitions of selfhood and narrative techniques examined in the previous chapter. The existentialist self, encapsulating as it does the concept of an authenticity continually hard-won by dynamic, individual choice amidst a contingent universe, stands in opposition to a self whose behavioural patterns and values issue from a pre-existent masculine core. As Mark Poster has pointed out, for existentialist thinkers, ‘Consciousness existed […] before it had any particular attributes — before, that is, it had an essence’ (82). Identity is won by the constant striving of the individual, not inherited by virtue of solidarity with a group: in fact, existential authenticity is usually apprehended as being inversely proportionate to social conformity. The existential novel should stand in antithesis to the masculine text. The notion of existence as ‘being-in-the-world’, with its acknowledgement of the subjectivity and instability of each individual viewpoint, provides a marked contrast to Malcolm Bradbury’s lauded ‘art of reason’ (1969, iii), based upon a supposedly objective record of a supposedly recognisable universal experience.
4 Chapter One: Introduction 6 Chapter Two: The Consolations of Conformity 44 Chapter Three: The C... more 4 Chapter One: Introduction 6 Chapter Two: The Consolations of Conformity 44 Chapter Three: The Consolations of Philosophy 113 Chapter Four: Non-Conformity and the Sixties 201 Conclusions: Reading to Belie the Binary 298
The year 1956 is routinely characterised by historical commentators as something of a seismic yea... more The year 1956 is routinely characterised by historical commentators as something of a seismic year for Britain with regard to its international and imperial reputation. In The People’s Peace, Kenneth O. Morgan characterises it to be the year that saw: Almost the last British independent military venture in the twentieth century, and amongst the most humiliating. It tore apart the Anglo-American relationship and damaged the unity of the Commonwealth. It made Britain a pariah at the United Nations and brought its economic stability into grave question. […] Worst of all, the British stood branded as offenders against international law, if not plain liars. (153–4) The various vainglorious and increasingly isolating decisions of the British government played out after the announcement on 19 July by both Britain and the United States that they were unable to participate in financing the construction of the Aswan High Dam due to enduring Egyptian connections with the Soviet Union. A week later, President Nasser seized the Suez Canal under a nationalisation decree, intending to use revenues from the waterway to fund the project. The invasion and bombardment of Egypt by British and French troops, wreathed in anachronistic rhetoric by Prime Minister Eden (he likened Nasser to Hitler), culminated in a ceasefire demanded by the US and the United Nations at the beginning of November.
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Trace: Ten... more This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact
Many universities are striving to internationalise, each with its own rationale. To benefit stud... more Many universities are striving to internationalise, each with its own rationale. To benefit students, these efforts must go beyond the recruitment of international students and the development of transnational education, even though these bring their own fiscal and cultural rewards. Here we examine the value of the other strands of the international agenda – student and staff exchange and internationalising the curriculum – as the aspects that most directly benefit the student experience.
was the fundamental weapon in the class struggle” for workers and for women (p. 128). Even more t... more was the fundamental weapon in the class struggle” for workers and for women (p. 128). Even more than claims for women’s public engagement, Arkinstall argues that López de Ayala’s work, including her dramas and novels, was characterized by an insistence that “any transformation of the national body into a viable democracy depends on concomitant reforms in the domestic sphere, unseating patriarchal power, and addressing women’s position within civil society” (p. 101). Sárraga, also a journalist and charismatic speaker, was active on an international scale, carrying messages of republicanism and feminism to Portugal, Argentina, Chile, and North Africa, as well as attending international conferences of freethinkers in Paris, Geneva, and Rome. Arkinstall highlights the feminist dimension of her contributions to one of these major conferences in Geneva, demonstrating that “for Sárraga women’s rights pertain not only to their sex but, more especially, to the nation as a whole” (p. 161). In...
Contemporary study of literary masculinities is under pinned by a founding assumption: that the s... more Contemporary study of literary masculinities is under pinned by a founding assumption: that the specificity of male gender constructions and experience is initially, and tactically, hidden beneath the textual surface. Antony Easthope began the influential What A Man’s Gotta Do with a claim that, ‘despite all that has been written over the past twenty years on femininity and feminism, masculinity has stayed pretty well concealed. This has always been its ruse to hold on to its power’ (Easthope 1990: 1). At Liverpool John Moores University, an important part of our work on the gender-based English modules is engaged with uncovering the (male) gendered particularity of purportedly ‘universal’ themes, in the man-making experiments of Victor Frankenstein, for example, and the contemporary parables of Ian McEwan. In the 1997 article ‘Integrating Men Into the Curriculum’, Michael Kimmel, himself a founding father of the contemporary paradigm of masculinity studies, has traced a similar blind-spot in teaching as well as textual processes, remarking of the ‘educational endeavour’ that ‘at every moment in the process, men are invisible’. They are invisible, he claims, ‘as men’ (Kimmel 1996: 181): that is, as men involved in a complex negotiation and performance of gender. It is, of course, precisely this failure to see the dynamics of masculinity at work in teaching and its designated texts that this volume seeks to redress.
British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960: Postwar, 2018
From the establishment of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 194... more From the establishment of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 1940, cultural regeneration was anticipated as a vital part of the reconstruction of Britain. The means of achieving this rejuvenation, however, remained conflicted once the Second World War was over. Although innovation was, as ever, an artistic priority, the pull of pre-war class and aesthetic certainties was also strong: to Norman Mackenzie, postwar Britain was in a ‘stalemate state, that curious interval in our social history, in which there was no way back to the world which had gutted out into war yet no clear way forward to a really new society’.1 Before the war began, Georg Lukács had attempted to move the debate around art’s social contract beyond the presiding battle-lines. Its terms, he claimed in a 1938 essay, ‘are not classics versus modernists; discussion must focus instead on the question: which are the progressive trends in the literature of today?’ He added: ‘It is the fate...
Popular iconography of the 1960s in Britain immortalises a decade triumphant in its counter-cultu... more Popular iconography of the 1960s in Britain immortalises a decade triumphant in its counter-culture, a sustained rebellion with effects more far-reaching and far more real than the conservative rantings of the Angries and the Outsiders of the English of the fifties. As Alan Sinfield puts it in Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, ‘the “1960s” is of course a myth; but that is an important thing to be, since what we think and do depends on the stories we tell ourselves’ (283). We are encouraged to retain a dominant fiction of an era liberated by satire, chemical stimulants and contraception, its audaciously won freedoms enshrined in the national culture by a rush of liberal legal reforms at the end of the decade.1 Paul Johnson’s farewell editorial for New Statesman on 26 June 1970 serves as a summation of the achievements of the period: ‘We no longer terrorise homosexuals. We do not force mothers to bring unwanted children into the world. We have made it easier to end ...
‘Existentialism is an attempt at philosophizing from the standpoint of the actor instead of as ha... more ‘Existentialism is an attempt at philosophizing from the standpoint of the actor instead of as has been customary, from that of the spectator’: so reads E. L. Allen’s attempt to ‘hazard a definition of existentialism in a sentence’ in his 1953 Existentialism from Within (3). Simplistic though this might be, it does prompt an immediate recognition of the potentially radical implications for the influence of existentialism upon the masculine definitions of selfhood and narrative techniques examined in the previous chapter. The existentialist self, encapsulating as it does the concept of an authenticity continually hard-won by dynamic, individual choice amidst a contingent universe, stands in opposition to a self whose behavioural patterns and values issue from a pre-existent masculine core. As Mark Poster has pointed out, for existentialist thinkers, ‘Consciousness existed […] before it had any particular attributes — before, that is, it had an essence’ (82). Identity is won by the constant striving of the individual, not inherited by virtue of solidarity with a group: in fact, existential authenticity is usually apprehended as being inversely proportionate to social conformity. The existential novel should stand in antithesis to the masculine text. The notion of existence as ‘being-in-the-world’, with its acknowledgement of the subjectivity and instability of each individual viewpoint, provides a marked contrast to Malcolm Bradbury’s lauded ‘art of reason’ (1969, iii), based upon a supposedly objective record of a supposedly recognisable universal experience.
4 Chapter One: Introduction 6 Chapter Two: The Consolations of Conformity 44 Chapter Three: The C... more 4 Chapter One: Introduction 6 Chapter Two: The Consolations of Conformity 44 Chapter Three: The Consolations of Philosophy 113 Chapter Four: Non-Conformity and the Sixties 201 Conclusions: Reading to Belie the Binary 298
The year 1956 is routinely characterised by historical commentators as something of a seismic yea... more The year 1956 is routinely characterised by historical commentators as something of a seismic year for Britain with regard to its international and imperial reputation. In The People’s Peace, Kenneth O. Morgan characterises it to be the year that saw: Almost the last British independent military venture in the twentieth century, and amongst the most humiliating. It tore apart the Anglo-American relationship and damaged the unity of the Commonwealth. It made Britain a pariah at the United Nations and brought its economic stability into grave question. […] Worst of all, the British stood branded as offenders against international law, if not plain liars. (153–4) The various vainglorious and increasingly isolating decisions of the British government played out after the announcement on 19 July by both Britain and the United States that they were unable to participate in financing the construction of the Aswan High Dam due to enduring Egyptian connections with the Soviet Union. A week later, President Nasser seized the Suez Canal under a nationalisation decree, intending to use revenues from the waterway to fund the project. The invasion and bombardment of Egypt by British and French troops, wreathed in anachronistic rhetoric by Prime Minister Eden (he likened Nasser to Hitler), culminated in a ceasefire demanded by the US and the United Nations at the beginning of November.
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