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This book attempts to interrogate the literary, artistic and cultural output of early modern England. Following Constance Classen's view that understandings of the senses, and sensory experience itself, are culturally and historically contingent; it explores the culturally specific role of the senses in textual and aesthetic encounters in England. The book follows Joachim-Ernst Berendt's call for 'a democracy of the senses' in preference to the various sensory hierarchies that have often shaped theory and criticism. It argues that the playhouse itself challenged its audiences' reliance on the evidence of their own eyes, teaching early modern playgoers how to see and how to interpret the validity of the visual. The book offers an essay on each of the five senses, beginning and ending with two senses, taste and smell, that are often overlooked in studies of early modern culture. It investigates Robert Herrick's accounts in Hesperides of how the senses function during sexual pleasure and contact. The book also explores sensory experiences, interrogating textual accounts of the senses at night in writings from the English Renaissance. It offers a picture of early modern thought in which sensory encounters are unstable, suggesting ways in which the senses are influenced by the contexts in which they are experienced: at night, in states of sexual excitement, or even when melancholic. The book looks at the works of art themselves and considers the significance of the senses for early modern subjects attending a play, regarding a painting, and reading a printed volume.
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.
immigrant narrative. As mentioned, Leicester's politically charged British Asian band Cornershop had even immortalised him in ‘Your life's so pristine / Mine's like the Hanif Kureishi scene.’ In an interview writer–professor Amitava Kumar asked him about those lines which now evoked nostalgia in Kureishi: ‘He said his life had been rife with sexual excitement once, and then he had kids.’ Not only had he played a pivotal role in inspiring second- and third-generation British Asians to become artists, but his early films had also helped create an
systematic questionnaire developed for diagnosing homosexuality.38 Thereby, there is a constant tension or ambiguity between letting the person tell her own story or express her feelings, and the attempt to observe, classify and objectify the characteristics of ‘the self ’. Sexual desires During the second half of the nineteenth century, the examination of what was incidentally labelled as ‘of psychological interest’ or as ‘of moral interest’ had been confined to the direction of one’s sexual inclinations as expressed in voluptuous dreams, sexual excitement, attraction and
made available to Mr K. Mr K made approaches to her on two occasions, the first in his office, when she was fourteen; in a state of obvious excitement he suddenly took hold of her and began to kiss her. She reacted with a violent feeling of disgust and ran out. Freud considered this reaction neurotic: in his view ‘this was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen’, since Mr K, as he explains in a footnote, was ‘still quite young and of prepossessing appearance’ (p. 60). The second occasion happened when Dora
as speaking soft and low, ‘that most excellent thing in woman’, a peculiarity owing to various causes, a principal one of which is, too much sexual excitement, producing a state of vocal organs closely resembling that of the male. 65 In this extract it is quite clear how Peter Gaskell, the author, defines factory girls in terms of their lack of middle-class feminine attributes. He also, incidentally, sheds light on aspects of middle-class male identity, as there are clear indications that he is physically attracted to these girls, suggesting that the sexual
–1965) characters, often driven by obsessive erotic desires, captivated him – yet another example of Kureishi's eclectic, cosmopolitan interests. In one of Tanizaki's last novels, Diary of a Mad Old Man (1962), the aged, dying diarist is afflicted by a stroke brought on by an excess of sexual excitement. He records his efforts to bribe his daughter-in-law to provide sexual titillation in return for Western trinkets. The undercurrents of the old man's obsession with his son's wife, even as she treats him cruelly, would be echoed in Venus , but even more closely in Kureishi
create this image of womanhood, which was principally ‘designed to sell washing machines, cake mixes, deodorants, detergents, rejuvenating face-creams, hair tints’. 17 We should not be surprised by her observation that ‘[t]he hybrid idea that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her husband was a
Hollywood’ (2008: 90). Spanish ‘S’ films were no exception, and, although Williams finds these conventions in the sexploitation global cinemas of the 1970s, we can find them in Spanish ‘S’ and ‘X’ films of the 1980s, too. For instance, if we take the films scripted and directed by Ignacio F. Iquino, such as La desnuda chica del relax/The Naked Masseuse (1981) or Jóvenes amiguitas buscan placer/Young Friends Looking for Pleasure (1982), and look at the repertoire of gestures of the actresses in the sex scenes, we see that in order to insinuate sexual excitement they
order controlled the students’ intellectual, moral and social life with an unremitting rigour. The atmosphere of the place and time is captured in one event which McGahern had previously been reticent to disclose (because it seemed unbelievable). Students received a lecture warning them that as teachers they would have a ‘steady salary’ and, consequently, ‘would be an enormous source of sexual excitement’; as a result ‘girls might be prepared to do certain things because of our position and that it was our duty to restrain these women’.17 100 john mcgahern