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One of the first commentators to attempt a balanced reassessment of Pagnol was Cahiers du cinéma founder André Bazin, who in his 1959 classic
From British rule the independent Irish state inherited an effectively denominational system of university education and a complementary set of science and arts institutions. Under independent rule denominational influence increased and resource starvation prevailed until the end of the 1950s. Then, as the formation of human capital, education began to be treated as an input into economic growth and American initiatives stimulated new research activity. These changes played a vital role in the rebalancing of power between the Catholic Church and the state. Social science, where the Catholic Church had been a monopoly provider, supplies a dramatic case study of the interlinking of this power shift with the process of knowledge generation.
Popular dance in Britain fundamentally transformed in the early 1920s. This book explores the development, experience and cultural representation of popular dance in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. The specific focus is on two distinct yet occasionally overlapping commercial producers: the dance profession and the dance hall industry. The strong foreign, and increasingly American, influences on dancing directly connected this cultural form with questions about the autonomy and identity of the British nation. The book uses dancing as a lens through which to better understand broader historical processes of popular cultural production and consumption, and national identity construction. The first part of the book focuses on the efforts of dancing's producers to construct a standardised style and experience for British dancing, and the response to those efforts by consumers. These interactions determined which dances would find success in Britain, and how and where they would be performed. The second part demonstrates how these interactions between dancing's producers and consumers constructed, circulated, embodied, but also commodified, ideologies of gender, class, race and nation. The dance profession transformed the steps and figures of foreign dances like the foxtrot and tango into what became known as the 'English style' of ballroom dancing. The dance hall industry launched a series of novelty dances, such as the Lambeth Walk, that were celebrated for their British origins and character, and marketed the wartime dance floor as a site of patriotism and resistance.
the ways in which the standardisation of the English style would be about considerably more than establishing a set form of steps and figures. As the interwar period progressed, popular dance became an important site of contestation over national identity and the growing influence in Britain of foreign – especially American – culture. Foreign culture, race and Anglicisation Anxieties about Americanisation were not exclusive to British dance professionals in this period. The entertainment industries that surrounded film, radio, popular music, music hall and
Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain explores the relationship between classic American films about juvenile delinquency and British popular youth culture in the mid-twentieth century. The book examines the censorship, publicity and fandom surrounding such Hollywood films as The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock alongside such British films as The Blue Lamp, Spare the Rod and Serious Charge. Intersecting with star studies and social and cultural history, this is the first book to re-vision the stardom surrounding three extraordinarily influential Hollywood stars: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley. By looking specifically at the meanings of these American stars to British fans, this analysis provides a logical and sustained narrative that explains how and why these Hollywood images fed into, and disrupted, British cultural life. Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain is based upon a wide range of sources including censorship records, both mainstream and trade newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts and memoirs, as well as the films themselves. The book is a timely intervention of film culture and focuses on key questions about screen violence and censorship, masculinity and transnational stardom, method acting and performance, Americanisation and popular post-war British culture. The book is essential reading for researchers, academics and students of film and social and cultural history, alongside general readers interested in the links between the media and popular youth culture in the 1950s.
) colonial administration in Puerto Rico from 1900 to 1930, and highlights the ways US nurses embodied those messages and participated in the Americanisation campaign. In 1898, after the Spanish–American War, the US took possession of former Spanish colony, Puerto Rico. The transfer of colonial administration of Puerto Rico from the Spanish to the US took place on social, religious and governmental levels. The colonial and missionary administrators needed trained nurses to effectively run their public health and hospital facilities. These same administrators also wanted to
as the French Steven Spielberg. (Sarris, 1991 ) Many film critics, in France and within the international film scene, share the conviction that Luc Besson is one of the most Americanised European filmmakers of his generation, a typical byproduct of Hollywood’s pervasive influence over nation-state cinemas. This reputation has accompanied Besson for most of
, Americanisation and its effect upon the Black Briton’s selfimage are still prominent within mediated texts, shunting positive Black portrayals and consequent fandom toward African-Americans like Oprah Winfrey or Bill Cosby, and away from Black British talent. As a means of exploring the opinions and interpretations of Black British media professionals, interviewed were ten participants involved directly or indirectly with media production or criticism between 1993 and 2010 in the UK and the USA. Black as defined to these participants fell within the same definitive framework as
, highlighting the feminine aesthetic of horror and how this is played out with respect to transformations of identity within horror film and fiction. It is proposed that this form of comparative analysis – that is, of the main elements of horror in a British short story and its ‘Americanised’ Hollywood film version – can underscore the gendered dimensions of, and reactions to, horror narratives
’s well-known observation on the Americanisation of London’s suburban landscape is used here to introduce the particular roadscape of the Great West Road. American and British manufacturers were attracted in great numbers to London’s western arterial roads. Joan Skinner has explained how this attraction developed and how technological developments and aesthetic and architectural choices provided for a very specific roadscape of elegant white factories.41 For the purposes of this chapter, two buildings are considered: Wallis, Gilbert and Partners’ Firestone Factory of