Description
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.
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.
