England, year zero: Satire in postwar British popular culture.
Item
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Title
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England, year zero: Satire in postwar British popular culture.
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Identifier
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AAI3127916
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identifier
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3127916
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Creator
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Rawlings, Roger E.
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Contributor
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Advisers: Peter Hitchcock | Louis Menand
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Date
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2004
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Cinema | Mass Communications
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Abstract
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Though respected by Hollywood, critics, and the public for the intensity and zaniness of their characters and narratives, a serious study has yet to be made of certain English comedies after World War II, not as mere "comedies," but as achievements of high satire-key cultural documents in understanding new England facing a new world. Using a Cultural Studies methodology, this study will redress the balance by investigating the work of certain writers, filmmakers and performers working in postwar England, and identifies the period between 1947 and 1953 as a particularly fertile moment for British satire---a time when British cultural identity was seriously redefining itself amid a socio-economic landscape of loss of empire, crippling rationing, and Labour's newly implemented Welfare State.;Much has been written about the Angry Young Men, the Movement poets, and British social realism of the mid-fifties, but the satiric artists and filmmakers discussed here were making their commentaries earlier, in the immediate aftermath of war's end. The project specifically seeks to show how the British satires of the late-1940s/early-1950s were a highly original and authentic indigenous response to a nation's critical identity crisis. Some film texts considered are Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts & Coronets (1949), Whiskey Galore (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), among others, as well as the militant satirist Spike Milligan's BBC radio program, "The Goon Show," which was also at its most prolific during this period.;The final chapter discusses later English satires inspired by these early 1950s artists, including works from Beyond the Fringe, the Beatles' mid-sixties films and the Monty Python TV shows, to later satires in print (Private Eye), on film (Withnail & I ), in music (The Fall) and on stage (Bill Hicks). But the time between 1947 and 1953 is the central focus as the particularly fertile moment for British satire. The British satires of the late forties and early fifties held up a mirror to an England rife with change, helping to codify who they were and where they were headed as a newly inward-turning island culture.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
