Название: The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939-1945
Автор: Martin Francis
Издательство: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199277486
Год: 2009
Формат: PDF
Страниц: 287
Для сайта: litgu.ru
Размер: 2,9 МБ
Язык: Английский
Between 1939 and 1945, the British public was spellbound by the martial endeavors and dashing style of the young men of the RAF, especially those with silvery fabric wings sewn above the breast pocket of their glamorous slate-blue uniform. Martin Francis provides the first scholarly study of the place of "the flyer" in British culture during the Second World War. Examining the lives of RAF personnel, and their popular representation in literary and cinematic texts, he illuminates broader issues of gender, social class, national and racial identities, emotional life, and the creation of a national myth in twentieth-century Britain. In particular, Francis argues that the flyer's relationship to fear, aggression, loss of his comrades, bodily dismemberment, and psychological breakdown reveals broader ambiguities surrounding the dominant understandings of masculinity in the middle decades of the century.