Eye On The Flesh: Fashions Of Masculinity In The Early Twentieth CenturyWhen do our bodies cease to be ours alone? At what point and under what political and social circumstances do our bodies become the subtle, but no less complete, inscription of the will of another person, an institution, or a state? Maurizia Boscagli analyzes the early twentieth-century transformation of the male body from Forster's “unassuming black-coated clerk” and Eliot's “young man carbuncular” to the brutal, tanned musculature of fascism. She argues that this new male superman corporeality corresponded precisely with the rise of early mass consumer culture—generally associated with the female—and the advent of fascism. This mechanistic, polished, and vigorous male creature inevitably became an object of political and economic obedience and conformity, and in the concept of “the national body,” a fighting machine.Boscagli takes the reader on a highly informed, literary, and cultural excursion through European culture between 1880 and 1930. She stops for long, enlightening looks at Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Good War and the poet Rupert Brooke, Baden-Powell and the British Boy Scouts, and the primitive in D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent. This erudite study about our obsessions with male physical perfection undergirds and explains the late-twentieth-century preoccupation with exercise, athletics, diet, and consumerism. |
Contents
Supermen Office Clerks | 55 |
Automaton Masculinity | 129 |
Primitivist Bodies Native Clothing | 165 |
Copyright | |
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aesthete aesthete's aestheticism African animal Aschenbach beauty become blond beast British Cipriano clerk clothes colonial commodity commodity fetishism consumer consumption corporeality culture D. H. Lawrence Death in Venice discourse display Dorian Gray early twentieth century erotic eroticism Eugen Sandow eugenicist excess expenditure fantasy feminine fetishism figure fin de siècle function Futurist gaze gender gesture Gramsci hero homoerotic homoerotic desire homoeroticism homosexual Howard's End human identity ideology individual Jarry kitsch Lawrence Lawrence's Leiris Leiris's Lobengula London machine Mafarka male body male subject manliness Marcueil Marinetti masculinity masochism masochistic mass mechanical Metropolis middle class modern modernist muscles narrative native nature Nietzsche Nietzschean Nietzschean body novel object ornament Pater petty bourgeois phallus photographs physical physique pleasure popular poses production Ramón representation represented Rupert Brooke Sandow scene sentimental sexuality signified social space spectacle superman Tadzio Tarzan tion transgressive turn virility Wilde Wilde's Winckelmann woman women worker