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Notes Introduction 1. Raymond Williams, George Orwell 15. Williams goes on to argue that in spite of Orwell’s deliberate cultivation of a socialist consciousness, he never escapes his embedded class ideology, as evidenced by his troubled and troubling representations of the working classes. Williams takes particular issue with the “stale revolutionary romanticism” in the representation of the “proles” in Animal Farm and 1984. In these texts, he argues, “both the consciousness of the workers and the possibility of an authentic revolution are denied” (73). Orwell’s simultaneous celebration and patronization of the working classes in his documentary piece The Road to Wigan Pier only serves to reinforce Williams’s argument. 2. Later, Philip Larkin’s poetics and his adaptation of the lyric seek to engage with a similar question of detached manly self-awareness in the fully domesticated and insular postwar era, when the purpose for which it was cultivated—imperial and national governance—is no longer the birthright or the responsibility of the middleclass Englishman. See also Paulin, “She Did Not Change.” 3. Alison Light’s phrase “conservative modernity” is particularly apt to describe the writers mentioned above, for the “conservative modernity” that characterized the 1930s “simultaneously looks backwards and forwards; it could accommodate the past in the new forms of the present” (10). Indeed, Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters adapt the same phrase to describe the ferment of the postwar period in the introduction to their revisionist anthology of essays on postwar Britain . See Conekin et al. 1–25. 4. See Berberich and Mason. 5. Indeed, Connell offers three other categories of masculinity: complicit, subordinate , and marginalized; the last two define masculinities that emerge from factors that lie outside the gender order, i.e., race, class, and sexuality (although sexuality , while a distinct concept, is linked to gender identity in ways that race and class are not). 6. The residual, emergent, and dominant is an adaptation of Raymond Williams ’s supple concept of “structures of feeling,” which he defines as “meanings and values as they are actively felt and lived.” I find these terms particularly useful as the play and push between the three terms addresses the stylizations of masculinity that constitute the dominant norm (“Structures of Feeling” 132). Also see Williams , “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent” 121–27. 220 Notes to Pages 7–25 7. Postcolonial studies of English culture range from Ian Baucom’s Out of Place, an examination of the centrality of imperial place/space in the shifting constructions of Englishness from the nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries; Jed Esty’s Shrinking Island, an influential analysis of the generic shifts in the works of the high modernists as they come to terms with a “shrinking island”; John Marx’s Modernist Novel, a consideration of the decline of England and the rise of English; and, more recently, Peter Kalliney’s study of English exceptionalism that focuses on the English class system, Cities of Affluence and Anger. 8. See Esty 1–20, Light 8–10, and Sinfield, Literature, Politics 186–87. 9. See Morgan, People’s Peace. 10. See Berberich 15–29, and Brook 1–3. 11. W. Allen, “New Novels” 136. 12. See Morrison, Gindin, and Gasiorek. 13. Marquand 57. Also see Rabinowitz 23. 14. Critics from Walter Allen to James English have read Jim Dixon’s conflict with the upper-class Welches and the world of the academia as the lower-class insurgent ’s dissatisfaction with the claustrophobic and pretentious world of upper-class academia to which his new education has allowed him access. See Allen, Tradition and Dream, and English 138. 15. It is necessary to point out here that Gore-Urquhart is Scottish, so the masculine values that are validated can be considered British, but within this novel and others by Kingsley Amis, British values are English values. He frequently mocks what he considers to be excessive regional pride. See, for instance, his mockery of Welsh nationalists in That Uncertain Feeling (1955). Indeed, Englishness is the unacknowledged universal default within Britishness. 16. This also explains why the lower-middle-class and middle-class protagonists and personae in works by Philip Larkin, John Osborne, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and even John Braine were canonized as the new Englishmen in postwar literature, and not working-class protagonists such as Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). The new emergent forms of masculinity that cultural and literary commentators saw as...

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