BROOK, S. Literature and Cultural Criticism in the 1950s. Palgrave Macmillan. 2007.

BROOK, S. Literature and Cultural Criticism in the 1950s. Palgrave Macmillan. 2007.

Hardback, 208pp., NEW, Literature and Cultural Criticism in the 1950s argues that a key figure emerges in the literature and cultural criticism of the fifties and early sixties: the 'feeling male body', which is both the symptom of the cultural crisis and its cure. The feeling male body of New Left cultural criticism - Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart, and Raymond Williams - and Angry Young Man writing - Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, and John Braine - embodies the possibilities of a new postwar order, but also registers its effects through bodily and emotional pain. Male protagonists are feminized in many respects - masochistic, powerless and victimized - but this feminization becomes a means to re-establish masculine power. This book traces the way in which the unstable trope of the feeling male body is reworked by women writers of the fifties and early sixties, including Lynne Reid Banks, Shelagh Delaney, and Doris Lessing, and in selected cultural criticism, novels and films of the seventies, eighties and nineties.
9781403941060