...if you have ever mulled over this question, then panic not, friends! I have a new chapter for that. I am pleased to say that my chapter on Drama in the 1930s has just been published in the new The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s. I am delighted to see this in print, alongside chapters from a whole host of illustrious modernists. Rather brilliantly, my chapter is one of those available open-access on Google Books. Do let me know if it inspires any questions or thoughts.
Here is the abstract so you can decide if it worth your reading time: In 1938, Stephen Spender imagined a ‘revolution in the ideas of drama’, a theatre that could both deal with the complex socio-politics of the decade and take on new aesthetic challenges. The trouble, of course, was what this drama might look like in practice. In fact, in addressing the multifarious artistic and political disputes of this period, drama in the 1930s resists easy critical definition, residing in a liminal sense betwixt and between positions, terminology, and aesthetics. It can be read as highbrow, lowbrow, or middlebrow, with many individual examples flitting between these permeable categories. With everything "going on" right now, you might need a little bit of new wrestling scholarship. If so then I got you covered. My new article 'Queer Music-Hall Sport: All-In Wrestling and Modernist Fakery' has just been published my Modernism/modernity. I am still quite amazed that this great journal agreed to publish this article at all! It is the first time I have tried to uncover resonances between the disparate bits of my research. At first it didn't seem that wrestling and modernism had that much to say to each other. Hopefully this article begins to prove this assumption incorrect. It connects the 1930s' history of British professional wrestling to broader modernist concerns about fakery, pretence and lies. There are some fun stories in there, as well as some theoretical stuff, and, best of all, I managed to sneak mentions of Jerry 'The King' Lawler v Andy Kaufmann (1982) and the Parents' Television Council's law 2001 lawsuit against the WWE into the footnotes of the world's leading modernist journal!
Currently you can access the article for free through the journal's own website here. But if a paywall ever reappears then you can find a green-access version at Loughborough University's repository here. The article is published with huge thanks to everyone at Modernism/modernity, Andy Frayn (who managed to solve my framing problem for me), Ben Litherland (who kindly read the article and offered lots of helpful suggestions) and everyone at Wrestling Resurgence for inspiring me to write it in the first place. |
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