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This book looks at the highly publicised, sensational trials of several young female protagonists in the period 1918-1924. These cases, all presented by the press as morality tales involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion, are used as a prism through which to identify concerns about modern femininity. The book first examines a libel case, brought by a well-known female dancer against a maverick right-wing MP for the accusation of lesbianism. One aspect of this libel trial involved the drawing up of battle-lines in relation to the construction of a new, post-war womanhood. The book then looks at two inquests and three magistrate-court trials that involved women and drugs; young women in relationships with Chinese men were also effectively in the dock. One way of accessing court proceedings has been via the account of the trial published as part of the Notable British Trial Series. There are no extant trial transcripts. But there are prosecution depositions lodged at the National Archives, much press reportage, and a number of relevant memoirs, all giving a keen sense of the key issues raised by the trial. The book also focuses on an extraordinary divorce case, that of Christabel Russell, involving cross-dressing, claims of a virgin birth, extreme sexual ignorance, and a particular brand of eccentric modern femininity.
Gothic elements in ‘Den lille Havfrue’, ‘Snedronningen’ and ‘De vilde Svaner’ One aspect of Andersen's Gothic can be described as body horror, and ‘Den lille Havfrue’ is one of his tales that in its original version includes bodily mutilation of a young female protagonist: the little mermaid's tongue is cut out. 11 It also includes the frightening Gothic figure of the sea witch and her horrifying environment. The sea witch's house in ‘Den lille Havfrue’ is set ‘in the midst of a peculiar forest. All
This book is a social history of northern soul. It examines the origins and development of this music scene, its clubs, publications and practices, by locating it in the shifting economic and social contexts of the English midlands and north in the 1970s. The popularity of northern soul emerged in a period when industrial working-class communities were beginning to be transformed by deindustrialisation and the rise of new political movements around the politics of race, gender and locality. The book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of youth culture, popular music and everyday life in post-war Britain. The authors draw on an expansive range of sources including magazines/fanzines, diaries, letters, and a comprehensive oral history project to produce a detailed, analytical and empathetic reading of an aspect of working-class culture that was created and consumed by thousands of young men and women in the 1970s. A range of voices appear throughout the book to highlight the complexity of the role of class, race and gender, locality and how such identities acted as forces for both unity and fragmentation on the dance floors of iconic clubs such as the Twisted Wheel (Manchester), the Torch (Stoke-on-Trent), the Catacombs (Wolverhampton) and the Casino (Wigan).
novelist Carmen Laforet was shocked on travelling to the USA to hear about levels of violence there in comparison with her city of residence, Madrid, ‘where one can go for a walk at midnight with almost the same peace of mind as at midday’; 74 her tour guide was reportedly surprised by the young female protagonist of Nada being free to roam the streets of Barcelona at night without being bothered. That apologists of the dictatorship so frequently referred to safety as one of its crowning achievements perhaps understandably led many progressive voices to downplay the
this book, featuring young female protagonists in the period 1918 to 1924 – ‘sensational’ because ������������ the protagonists were involved in what was widely seen as ‘transgressive’ sex. Equally fascinating is the������������������������������������������������ obsessive focus on the behaviour of women: the woman in the dock, those women who were part of the courtroom audi- ence, and women generally in the wider society. These trials had extensive j j modern women on trial press coverage, unsurprising given that ��������������������������������� in the 1920s
traditions’ (Nettelbeck, 2007: 308). The importance of female figures The predominance of strong female protagonists who are placed at the center of the narrative and move the plot forward is another feature of Kechiche’s work. It contrasts with the figure of woman as metaphor of absence in many films by Maghrebi-French directors (with the exception of Malik Chibane’s Hexagone and Douce France). As noted by Will Higbee, ‘While Kechiche will remain true to the universe of the adolescent banlieusard, his film offers significant agency to the young female protagonists of the
thriller, Broken Away.2 Such sentiments – the passionate desire for liberty and the railing against frustrated ambition – speak generally to New Woman incentives in the period and might well be read as deriving from the author’s own life experience. In fact, the opposite is the case: at odds with the trammeled circumstances of her young female protagonist, Grimshaw herself carved out a life, and a career, of extraordinary expansion and range, gaining a rich international literary profile as a novelist, journalist, and travel writer and, more unusually perhaps for the
famille ends on a fantasy of escape testifies to the ongoing difficulty of representing young people of Maghrebi descent as happily settled in France. Nevertheless, the choice of young female protagonists combined with the setting in the North enables Bouchareb to avoid the violence of the male-oriented banlieue films and represent a more fluid vision of a multicultural France. La Vie de Jésus/The Life of Jesus (1997) and Karnaval (1999
), Samia (Philippe Faucon 2000) and 100% Arabica (Mahmoud Zemmouri 1997), present increasingly favourable depictions of language difference. Samia and other films in particular represent young female protagonists as enjoying a more positive relationship with language diversity than their male counterparts, both speaking French and embracing their parents’ native language. These female-centred films deal with multiple languages: in Karin Albou’s 2005 La Petite Jérusalem, the ambitious protagonist Laura embraces her Hebrew language use along with her Jewish origins. Other
-wire fences in particular evoke a sense of confinement and enclosure, and the harkis are portrayed as being locked in prisons of various types – in the camp itself, in silence, in unwanted stigmatizing labels, and, in the case of the young female protagonists, in undesired gender roles. At the same time, the camp represents exclusion and marginalization on the national level. Its location in a remote area recalls the idea that the harkis had come to embody the nation’s dishonor and constituted a reminder of ‘la mauvaise conscience et l’échec de la France’ (Besnaci