Conflicting Masculinities: Men in Television Period Drama (Library of Gender and Popular Culture)

"Never before has period drama offered viewers such an assortment of complex male characters, from transported felons and syphilitic detectives to shell shocked soldiers and gangland criminals. Neo-Victorian Gothic fictions like Penny Dreadful represent masculinity at its darkest, Poldark and Outlander have refashioned the romantic hero and anti-heritage series like Peaky Blinders portray masculinity in crisis, at moments when the patriarchy was being bombarded by forces like World War I, the rise of first wave feminism and the breakdown of Empire. Scholars of film, media, literature and history explore the very different types of maleness offered by contemporary television and show how the intersection of class, race, history and masculinity in period dramas has come to hold such broad appeal to twenty-first-century audiences."-- Provided by publisher Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Series Editors’ Foreword Introduction Conflicted Men Men at Work Warfare The Female Gaze Part I. The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 1. The Masculine Economies of Banished Introduction Masculine Economies Violence and Sacrifice Banished, Masculinity and Australian History Conclusion 2. ‘I will not fight for my country . . . for my ship . . . my King . . . or Captain’: Redefining Imperial Masculinities in To the Ends of the Earth Introduction Empire, Masculinity and the Sea This Ship of Fools is England The Sea as a Philosophical and Nightmarish Space Masculinity, Sexuality and the Sea ‘I kill people without knowing it’ Conclusion 3. Television Costume Drama and the Eroticised, Regionalised Body: Poldark and Outlander Introduction Masculinities and Male Bodies Regional Identity and the Body Colonised Territory: Looking at the Naked Male Body Outlander: Body as Contested Territory Conclusion 4. Power and Passion: Seventeenth-Century Masculinities Dramatised on the BBC in the Twenty-First Century Seventeenth-Century Drama on the BBC Coming of Age Passion Interior and Exterior Masculinities Conclusion Part II. Visions of the Nineteenth Century 5. A Post-Feminist Hero: Sandy Welch’s North and South ‘The Darcy Model’: Andrew Davies’s Pride and Prejudice The Evolution of Post-Feminist Masculinities in the Televised Classic Novel Moving Beyond Darcymania: A Hero in His Own Right North and South (2004): Thornton’s Re-inscription as a Post-Feminist Victorian Hero Men as Men: Male Community Wounded Masculinity: Male Emotion Homosocial Bonding: John Thornton and Nicholas Higgins Post-Feminism and the Father Figure Conclusion 6. ‘Because my daddy would protect them’: Ripper Street’s Edmund Reid and the Competing Demands of Home and Public Lives Losing His Home: Series One and Two Regaining His Home: Series Three Reid and Neo-Victorian Representations of Masculinity Daddy/Detective Conclusion 7. ‘Pleasure and pain, again and again’ – Between Monstrosity and Inner Turmoil: The Representation of Masculinity in Penny Dreadful Introduction: ‘Not a girl’s heart. A man’s heart’ ‘When you transform a life, you’re making it anew’: Penny Dreadful and Victorian Gothic ‘For the monster is not in my face, but in my soul’: The Portrayal of Conflicted Gothic Masculinity in Penny Dreadful ‘You’re a very young man. I’ve long since learnt that the truth is mutable’: Troubled Father and Son Relationships Conclusion 8. Pathological Masculinities: Syphilis and the Medical Profession in The Frankenstein Chronicles Monstrous Doctors and the Legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein An Unlikely ‘Hero’: Marlott and Syphilis Power and Education Changing Masculinities: Sharpe for the New Millennium? Conclusion Part III. Masculinities from World War I to the Cold War 9. ‘The war is done. Shut the door on it!’: The Great War, Masculinity and Trauma in British Period Television Uniforms and Masculine Authority Hysterical Men The Manly Death, Shirkers and Disabled Bodies The Veteran’s Anger Conclusion: Memorialising Male Sacrifice 10. Pride versus Prejudice: Wounded Men, Masculinity and Disability in Downton Abbey The Dilemma of Disabled Masculinity ‘Think of me as dead': Matthew Crawley’s Disabled Masculinity Disabled Masculinity: The Case of Mr Bates Conclusion 11. A Minority of Men: The Conscientious Objector in Period Drama ‘His name is Coward. His name is Shirker’: Realism and Melodrama in The Village ‘Mixed with sour milk’: Downton Abbey’s Idealistic CO ‘You’re not the man I thought you were’: Echoes of World War I in Home Fires and Upstairs, Downstairs Conclusion 12. Cads, Cowards and Cowmen: Masculinity in Crisis in World War II Television Drama Masculinity in British Cinema and Television Drama Wounded Masculinity in Period Drama The WI Saves the Day Conclusion 13. ‘Have you seen Walliams’ Bottom?’: Detecting the ‘Ordinary’ Man in Partners in Crime Gender and Genre Camp David, Camp Criticism and Otherness The Two Tommys: The Secret Adversary and Models of Male Identity Of Bees and Men: Gender Dualism and the Detective Figure Conclusion 14. ‘No Need to Matronise Me!’: The Crown, the Male Consort and Conflicted Masculinity The Feminised Monarchy and Melodrama The Male Consort: Malcontent and Moderniser The Crown and the Philip Problem The Crown and the Twenty-First Century Bibliography Index "Never before has period drama offered viewers such an assortment of complex male characters, from transported felons and syphilitic detectives to shell shocked soldiers and gangland criminals. Neo-Victorian Gothic fictions like Penny Dreadful represent masculinity at its darkest, Poldark and Outlander have refashioned the romantic hero and anti-heritage series like Peaky Blinders portray masculinity in crisis, at moments when the patriarchy was being bombarded by forces like World War I, the rise of first wave feminism and the breakdown of Empire. Scholars of film, media, literature and history explore the very different types of maleness offered by contemporary television and show how the intersection of class, race, history and masculinity in period dramas has come to hold such broad appeal to twenty-first-century audiences."--Back cover