Prosthetic Agency
Literature, Culture and Masculinity after World War II
- Author: Gill Plain, University of St Andrews, Scotland
- Date Published: July 2023
- availability: Available
- format: Hardback
- isbn: 9781316513200
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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.
Read more- Uses popular culture to explore constructions of masculinity in the aftermath of WWII
- Combines gender theory with disability studies to offer an innovative perspective on postwar Britain
- Examines the plots of popular fiction to show how postwar reconstruction was imagined, mapping the relationship between social change and fictional narrative
Reviews & endorsements
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
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×Product details
- Date Published: July 2023
- format: Hardback
- isbn: 9781316513200
- length: 300 pages
- dimensions: 235 x 158 x 23 mm
- weight: 0.57kg
- availability: Available
Table 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.
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