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Host: Roehampton University of Surrey
Homepage: http://www.hallco.freeserve.co.uk/arthurhome.html
Email: lisasam@hallco.freeserve.co.uk
Organizers: Lisa Hall, Simon Edwards
Deadline for abstracts: February 15, 2002
Description:
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE OVER A SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
New modes of cultural production and distribution in the 1950s have meant there was no shortage of male icons to emerge in the decade. In British writing of the period masculinity itself seems to perform an iconic role in embodying and challenging the beliefs and shibboleths of an older culture perceived as increasingly redundant.
The conference takes as its focus English neo-realist fiction of the period including such novelists as Sillitoe, Braine, Storey, Barstow, Amis and Wilson. Their insistent concern with an assertive but beleagured male identity (mentored by both Lawrence and Orwell) seems to call into question nearly all the assumptions about class and many of the assumptions about sexuality that underpinned writing earlier in the century (Woolf, Waugh, Huxley et al). Frequently acclaimed at the time as culturally and politically radical much of this writing has, in turn, come to be seen as clumsy, sexist and of dubious value. At the same time its sympathetic engagement with popular culture and life has contributed significantly to contemporary perspectives and practices in literature, film and television.
We want to take a closer look at both the writing and the contexts, including the radical transformation of the material life and the political and economic expectations of British society after World War Two, in an attempt to understand better the often ambiguous nature of its male protagonists in both the social and literary spheres.
We are inviting papers of twenty minutes on all relevant aspects of British life and culture of the period (as well as its antecedents and aftermaths). Topics and approaches might include:
Working-class life: image and reality - Popular culture and American models - The music business - Fashion and design - Gender studies and Queer Theory - Censorship, the law and the Wolfenden Report - End of Empire: Suez and its aftermath - Industrial and technological change - Immigration and HMS Windrush - Medical, psychological and scientific discourses - Film and television - National service - The rise of the celebrity - The position of sport - Orwell, Hoggart and the Uses of Sociology -
Speakers: Keynote speakers include Deborah Philips and Andy Medhurst
Mail Address:
Lisa Hall Conference Coordinator, The Importance of Being Arthur School of English and Modern Languages Roehampton University of Surrey Roehampton Lane London SW15 5PU England
Submitted by: Lisa Hall
Date received: November 12, 2001
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