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16 results

  • Exchange Value: British “Scholarship Boys” in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

  • D. L. LEMAHIEU
  • Journal:
    Journal of American Studies / Volume 51 / Issue 1 / February 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    06 January 2016, pp. 183-204
    Print publication:
    February 2017

  • In the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of British “scholarship boys” traveled to America sponsored by British and American foundations. Their experiences in the United States qualify and complicate existing narratives about upwardly mobile meritocrats. First, Americans regarded these figures in a manner that helped alter their view of themselves. Distinctions that mattered in Britain became less significant in America, though scholarship boys remained shrewd enough to penetrate the veneer of a superficial egalitarianism. National identity became a marker that sidelined residual anxieties about social hierarchy. Second, American prosperity affected the bias against consumerism shared by many British intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century. As professionals supported by government or educational institutions, these visitors differentiated themselves from those in the private sector, which pursued other goals. America exposed scholarship boys to a system that assimilated consumerism without sacrificing professionalism and a commitment to social progress.

  • “Scholarship Boys” in Twilight: The Memoirs of Six Humanists in Post-Industrial Britain

  • D. L. LeMahieu
  • Journal:
    Journal of British Studies / Volume 53 / Issue 4 / October 2014
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    07 November 2014, pp. 1011-1031

  • The memoirs of six “scholarship boys”—Richard Hoggart, Frank Kermode, Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Perkin, A. H. Halsey, and Brian Magee—reveal the deeply varied experience of academically gifted working- and lower-middle-class males in the twentieth century. The arc from social outsider to cultural prominence drew upon a commitment to humanism acquired in their youth. Scholarship boys navigated the crosscurrents of post-industrial culture in many ways but shared an unwillingness to accept uncritically the sophisticated reductions of postmodern theory and the “creative destruction” of neoliberal practice. The life writing of these figures reveals the often-concealed subjectivities behind academic success, including the desire in old age to honor the lived worlds of their youth. Humanism remained a continuing though not always dominant strain in post-industrial culture.