‘I’m an adolescent. And that’s how I’m going to stay’: Lessing and Youth Culture 1956–1962

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Bentley
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
New Left ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Youth Groups ◽  
Anthony Burgess ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Youth Subcultures ◽  
British Culture

The mid-to-late 1950s saw an explosion of youth subcultures in Britain – teenagers, Teddy Boys, jazz fans, hipsters, beatniks, mods and rockers. This range generated a series of moral panics and media fascination. The New Left in particularly were split on whether to see these new youth groups as indicative of a consumer-led Americanization of traditional working-class British culture or as potential sites for cultural (and political) rebellion. Lessing’s representation of youth is particularly interesting in this context, and it is a recurring theme in a number of works from this period including her plays Each to His Own Wilderness and Play With a Tiger, her documentary novel In Pursuit of the English, and her novels A Ripple From the Storm and The Golden Notebook. This chapter traces Lessing’s engagement with youth culture and argues that she articulates concerns within the New Left and British culture more broadly. Her work is read against contemporary cultural commentary from the New Left, especially in a series of articles in the Universities and Left Review, and against other fiction and commentary from the period, including works by Lynne Reid Banks, Anthony Burgess, Shelagh Delaney, Richard Hoggart, Colin MacInnes, Alan Sillitoe, and Muriel Spark.

scholarly journals Reading Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange: Cultural Oddities and Their Social Impact

IIUC Studies ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 63-72
Author(s):  
Mohammad Kaosar Ahmed ◽  
Md Mizanur Rahman
Keyword(s):  
Youth Culture ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
British Society ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Anthony Burgess ◽  
Socioeconomic Changes ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World ◽  
British Culture

Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) portrays the disintegration of the traditional British culture and the rise of a new youth culture in revolt which produced violence and perversity. This youth culture started pervading the layers of the traditional British culture. The 1960s had found the British culture assuming a distorted shape both in values and norms - a culture completely opposite to its original tradition in terms of the socioeconomic changes that took place following the Second World War. The postwar generation had to peep into the collapsed world from a perspective quite different from the previous one because of the rising tension emerging out of a new threat from nuclear war hanging overhead. This paper seeks to explore the extent to which the newly emerged culture affected the young generation and brought about chaos and disorder in British society. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/iiucs.v7i0.12260 IIUC Studies Vol.7 2011: 63-72

Ambivalent Relationships: London's Youth Culture and the Making of the Multi-Racial Society in the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Class Youth

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.

Working Class Youth Culture.

Social Forces ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 964
Author(s):  
John Leggett ◽  
Geoff Mungham ◽  
Geoff Pearson ◽  
Serge Mallet
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Class Youth

“Wild West,” “Gangster,” and “Desperado” Feelings: The Perception of the “West” in Youth Subcultures in Hungary in the 1960s

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 180-198
Author(s):  
Sándor Horváth
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
The West ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Youth Cultures ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Youth Subcultures ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThe images of the “modern youth” and moral panics concerning the youth as a metaphor played an important part in the identity construction process throughout Cold War Europe. For Hungarian youth the West represented the land of promise and desires, albeit their knowledge of the Western other was highly limited and controlled by the socialist state. But how did the partly unknown West and its “folk devils” become the objects of desire in the East? For Western youngsters it seemed to be easier to realize their cultural preferences, however, youth cultures of the sixties were represented in the transnational discourses as manifestations of intra-generational, parent–adolescent conflicts not only in the Eastern Bloc, but also in Western democracies. The perception of the parent–child conflict became a cornerstone of the studies on the sixties, and the youth studies represented youth subcultures as “countercultures.” This paper addresses the role of the official discourse in the construction of “youth cultures” which lies at the heart of identity politics concerning youngsters. It looks at some of the youth subcultures which emerged in socialist Hungary and, in particular how “Eastern” youth perceived “the West,” and how their desires concerning the “Western cultures” were represented in the official discourse. It also seeks to show that borders created in the mind between “East” and “West” worked not only in the way that the “iron curtain” did, but it also became a cultural practice to create social identities following the patterns of Eastern and Western differentiation in the socialist countries.

scholarly journals The English City Riots of 2011, ‘Broken Britain’ and the Retreat into the Present

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 153-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Flint ◽  
Ryan Powell
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Urban Condition ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
Urban Disorder

The responses to the English city riots of 2011 bear a remarkable resemblance to those of historical urban disorders in terms of the way in which they are framed by concerns over “moral decline”, “social malaise” and a “lack of self-restraint” among certain sections of the population. In this paper we draw on the work of Norbert Elias and take a long-term perspective in exploring historical precedents and parallels relating to urban disorder and anti-social behaviour. We reject the notion of “Broken Britain” and argue that a more “detached” perspective is necessary in order to appreciate that perceived crises of civilisation are ubiquitous to the urban condition. Through this historical analysis, framed by Elias’ theory of involvement and detachment, we present three key arguments. Firstly, that a ‘retreat into the present’ is evident among both policy discourse and social science in responding to contemporary urban disorder, giving rise to ahistorical accounts and the romanticisation of previous eras; secondly, that particular moral panics have always arisen, specifically focused upon young and working class populations and urban disorder; and, thirdly, that previous techniques of governance to control these populations were often far more similar to contemporary mechanisms than many commentaries suggest. We conclude by advocating a long-term, detached perspective in discerning historical precedents and their direct linkages to the present; and in identifying what is particular about today's concerns and responses relating to urban disorder.

Moral Panics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chas Critcher
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Street Crime ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Culture Of Fear ◽  
Youth Subcultures

The concept of moral panic was first developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s, principally by Stan Cohen, initially for the purpose of analyzing the definition of and social reaction to youth subcultures as a social problem. Cohen provided a “processual” model of how any new social problem would develop: who would promote it and why, whose support they would need for their definition to take hold, and the often-crucial role played by the mass media and institutions of social control. In the early 1990s, Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda produced an “attributional” model that placed more emphasis on strict definition than cultural processes. The two models have subsequently been applied to a range of putative social problems which now can be recognized as falling into five principal clusters: street crime, drug and alcohol consumption, immigration, child abuse (including pedophilia), and media technologies. Most studies have been conducted in Anglophone and European countries, but gradually, the concept is increasing its geographical reach. As a consequence, we now know a good deal about how and why social problems come to be constructed as moral panics in democratic societies. This approach has nevertheless been criticized for its casual use of language, denial of agency to those promoting and supporting moral panics, and an oversimplified and outdated view of mass media, among other things. As proponents and opponents of moral panic analysis continue to debate the essentials, the theoretical context has shifted dramatically. Moral panic has an uncertain relationship to many recent developments in sociological and criminological thought. It threatens to be overwhelmed or sidelined by new insights from theories of moral regulation or risk, conceptualizations of the culture of fear, or the social psychology of collective emotion. Yet as an interdisciplinary project, it continues, despite its many flaws, to demand sustained attention from analysts of social problem construction.

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