Male Vampires

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-124
Author(s):  
Michael Guarneri
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Post War

The chapter zooms in on the cultural instrumentality of the vampire metaphor in Italy by studying Italian-made vampire movies as struggles for gender definition and domination that reflect the zeitgeist of post-war Italy, when a perceived decline in masculine authority due to the vicissitudes of World War Two, the hardships of reconstruction and the post-1958 neocapitalist consumerism went hand in hand with women’s ever-increasing challenges to traditional gender roles. The chapter ventures into the so-far uncharted territory of the Italian male vampires that populate horror parodies, straightforward horrors and horror-tinged adventures. It investigates how, within a masculinity-in-crisis framework, Italian makeshift Draculas act as champions of traditional virility, irresistible Latin lovers and tyrannical patres familias seeking to reassure Italian men of their gender leadership.

Female Vampires

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-106
Author(s):  
Michael Guarneri
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Sexual Predators ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Heterosexual Relationship ◽  
Post War

The chapter zooms in on the cultural instrumentality of the vampire metaphor in Italy by studying Italian-made vampire movies as struggles for gender definition and domination that reflect the zeitgeist of post-war Italy, when a perceived decline in masculine authority due to the vicissitudes of World War Two, the hardships of reconstruction and the post-1958 neocapitalist consumerism went hand in hand with women’s ever-increasing challenges to traditional gender roles. The chapter argues that the female vampires of Italian horror are not simplistically villainous, power-hungry sexual predators that misogynistic-reactionary narratives put to death as a punishment for attempting to subvert the patriarchal status quo. They also are empathy-inducing characters caught between rebellion and hyper-identification with traditional values: victims returning from the grave to seek revenge against their male oppressors, and tragic lovers dreaming of a monogamous heterosexual relationship that looks strangely similar to marriage.

scholarly journals The Enduring Influence of Female Special Operations Executive Agent Biopics on Cultural Memory and Representations in France and Great Britain

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. WLS144-WLS168
Author(s):  
Sylvie Pomiès-Maréchal
Keyword(s):  
Central Place ◽  
Specific Aspect ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
War Films ◽  
Special Operations ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
Fictional Representations

Seventy-five years have elapsed since the end of World War Two. Yet, the memory of the conflict still occupies a central place in British and French collective consciousness. Fiction and film representations of the war act as powerful ‘vectors of memory’, to borrow an expression from French historian Henry Rousso, and as such, they have deeply contributed to shaping popular and cultural memories of the war. This article investigates a specific aspect of World War Two representations, namely the cinematic representations of the female agents from the SOE F section, focusing on the ‘generic’ or archetypal figure of the female SOE agent as generated by the post-war cultural industry. After a brief contextualisation focusing on Churchill’s clandestine organisation, the article will analyse the contribution of Odette (Herbert Wilcox, 1950) and Carve Her Name with Pride (Lewis Gilbert, 1958) to the construction of a World War Two ‘mythology’. It will then address more recent films, concentrating on Charlotte Gray (Gillian Armstrong, 2001) and Female Agents (Jean-Paul Salomé, 2008). How did the fictional construction of the female spy come to influence the social and cultural perception of the SOE agent? Are the tropes developed in such post-war films as Odette or Carve Her Name with Pride still current or have they evolved with time? The analysis of these fictional representations will reveal the permanence or evolution of certain representational patterns and also allow us to approach different perspectives on the cultural representation of World War Two on both sides of the Channel.

scholarly journals American 'committed' drama in Slovene theatres

1994 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 57-65
Author(s):  
Igor Maver
Keyword(s):  
Social Criticism ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
To Come ◽  
Post War

The purpose of this study is essentially to demonstrate that the delayed stagings of American 'committed' plays, written in the thirties and produced in Slovene theatres immediately after World War Two in the late forties and fifties, were often miscontextualized and partly misinterpreted by the literary critics of the period. This was only in the early post-war years largely due to the need to serve the then ruling ideology and to comply with the criteria of Marxist aesthetisc, especially that of a radical social criticism. However, the later stagings particularly of Arthur Miller's and also Tennessee Williams's plays, did not see the same phenomenon, for it was they that assured the popularity of the American post-war drama on Slovene stages and, even more importantly, helped Slovene theatre to come off age in the sixties.

‘We Must Feed the Men’

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-160
Author(s):  
Gill Plain
Keyword(s):  
Women's Fiction ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Masculine Identity ◽  
War Narratives ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Post War ◽  
Purposeful Activity

Gill Plain interrogates the trend towards domestic heteronormativity post World War Two in the light of the complex and profound disorientation of women’s post-war lives. She identifies a pervasive sense of personal, social and cultural loss, following the ‘smothering’ of wartime expectations, that often extended beyond the heterosexual matrix. Where ‘male’ plots reprogrammed masculine identity through purposeful activity beyond the home, the absence of plot in women’s fiction signals a lack of interest in the post-war rebuilding of the normative feminine psyche. The ‘resistant plotting’ of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s post-war trilogy, and its emphasis on the urgency of maternity, exhibits a turn toward the gothic. Male damage is offset by female guilt and the onset of a second childhood in her male characters, leading to a narrative of remasculinization. The largely absent figure of the child in post war narratives suggests a generation in mourning for its abruptly foreclosed childhood.

scholarly journals Nogi. Męskość i niepełnosprawność w Szpitalu Czerwonego Krzyża Michała Choromańskiego

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arleta Galant
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Masculine Gender Roles ◽  
Second World ◽  
Masculine Gender

In the article, the author presents an interpretation of the novel Szpital Czerwonego Krzyża by Michał Choromański. One of the key interpretative hypothesis advanced by the author of the article based on a reading of the novel is the assumption that the work constitutes an important statement on masculinity and disability, exposing the artificiality and unoriginality of masculine gender roles and criticizing somatic culture. This criticism is, in turn, significant with regard to twentieth-century reflections on body issues in post-war modernity. The author of the article indicates that Choromański’s work, written before the Second World War but published not until 1956, is a piece of significancefor the reconstruction of issues of disability in terms of Polish literary history.

scholarly journals The books of problems in arithmetic by Mikas Petrauskas

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Algirdas Ažubalis
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
West Germany ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Aspect ◽  
The Real ◽  
The World ◽  
Arithmetic Teaching ◽  
Post War ◽  
Children Of War

Teacher Mikas Petrauskas (1908?) was the last author having published his books of problems in arithmetic for I-III forms of primary school in Independent Lithuania before the World War Two. As books of problems by other authors of the said period, the books of problems by M. Petrauskas distinguished themselves for expressed integration of arithmetic teaching with the real life of the pupils. The books of problems were used in Lithuania during the World War Two and at schools for children of war refugees in the post-war period at West Germany. M. Petrauskas was the only author that dared to publish reviewed books of problems in post-war Soviet Lithuania. However, the said review was not natural and integration with the real life was engaged considerably in the political aspect. The attempts were ineffective: within 5 years, books of problems by M. Petrauskas were displaced from Lithuanian schools by the ones approved in Moscow and translated from Russian.

scholarly journals Paradise Postponed: A Re-examination of the Green Book Proposals of 1945

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvin Finkel
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Reform Program ◽  
Green Book ◽  
Liberal Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
State Programs

Abstract During World War Two, all federal political parties sought to accommodate the growing demand for "welfare state" programs. Mackenzie King's Liberals successfully checked the growth of the CCF by promising a comprehensive program of cradle-to-grave security. After the 1945 election the Liberal government prepared such a program and brought it to a dominion-provincial conference whose purpose was to determine the taxation and administrative arrangements necessary for its implementation. The "conference", which became a series of mini-conferences stretched over nine months, ended without agreement. The federal government blamed recalcitrant premiers in Ontario and Quebec for the conference's failure and abandoned much of the reform program. This article argues that the federal government, in fact, wanted the conference to fail because it did not want to undertake the expenses implied in the reform proposals. After proving inflexible in dealing with provincial criticisms, it cynically and successfully manipulated events to make it appear that the provinces had killed hopes for reform. Post-war prosperity and a declining interest in reform, particularly on the part of the corporate and medical elites, contributed to the federal government's unwillingness to pursue reform vigorously.

scholarly journals American 'committed' drama in Slovene theatres

1994 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 57-65
Author(s):  
Igor Maver
Keyword(s):  
Social Criticism ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
To Come ◽  
Post War

The purpose of this study is essentially to demonstrate that the delayed stagings of American 'committed' plays, written in the thirties and produced in Slovene theatres immediately after World War Two in the late forties and fifties, were often miscontextualized and partly misinterpreted by the literary critics of the period. This was only in the early post-war years largely due to the need to serve the then ruling ideology and to comply with the criteria of Marxist aesthetisc, especially that of a radical social criticism. However, the later stagings particularly of Arthur Miller's and also Tennessee Williams's plays, did not see the same phenomenon, for it was they that assured the popularity of the American post-war drama on Slovene stages and, even more importantly, helped Slovene theatre to come off age in the sixties.

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