24318 results in Edinburgh University Press
Dedication
- Michelle Smith, Monash University, Victoria
-
- Book:
- Consuming Female Beauty
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp ix-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Conclusions: Domus Militaris
- Byron Waldron, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Dynastic Politics in the Age of Diocletian, AD 284-311
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 222-232
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Let us return to where this book began: on a hill, three miles outside of Nicomedia, where Diocletian addressed an assembly of officers and soldiers and announced that he was stepping down from his position as Augustus. The abdication of the Augusti in a period of stability was unprecedented in Roman history. Tetricus had abdicated in response to Aurelian’s invasion of Gaul, and Vitellius and Didius Julianus had similarly offered to abdicate in their attempts to avert their demise in civil war. However, Diocletian and Maximian were not faced with internal strife when they left office. Britain had returned to their control in 295 or 296, Egypt in 298, and by 299 Diocletian and Galerius had forced the empire’s greatest enemy, the Persians, to agree to a humiliating peace treaty. The Augusti may well have abdicated to fulfil the expectation that the Caesars would in turn become Augusti, and it is plausible that Diocletian also wished to supervise his own succession, controversial as it was. As an interventionist ruler, to directly preside over his succession was in character. This was, after all, the emperor who expanded the armies, restructured and augmented imperial and provincial administration, ordered the first codification of rescripts, reformed and revalued currency, introduced systems of census and indiction, introduced new forms of imperial imagery and ceremonial, standardised numismatic iconography and issued edicts on prices and religion. With all that being said, in making the decision to abdicate, perhaps Diocletian’s background was on display. For Diocletian, was the role of imperator the final appointment in a military career hinged on promotion and ending in retirement? Was Diocletian, as Umberto Roberto suggests, essentially a soldier retiring to his land to plant cabbages after a lengthy service or militia?
The thought is an enticing one, and it returns us to a theme of this book: the military professional as emperor. As military professionals who had become emperors, Diocletian and his colleagues were the successors of Maximinus I, Postumus, Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, Probus and Carus. These emperors were men who had climbed the ranks of the armies, some of them from relatively humble backgrounds, to become powerful members of a ruling circle replete with equestrian military officers. This demographic change in the imperial leadership would have affected imperial politics and the representation of emperors in contemporary media.
Foreword
- Edited by Anna Poupou, National and Capodistrian University of Athens, Nikitas Fessas, Universiteit Gent, Belgium, Maria Chalkou, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece
-
- Book:
- Greek Film Noir
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp xix-xxiv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Film noir has always been a mutating, elusive, even fugitive category, at once a central body of films from American cinema that includes Double Indemnity (dir. Wilder, 1944), Out of the Past (dir. Tourneur, 1947), Kiss Me Deadly (dir. Aldrich, 1955) and Touch of Evil (dir. Welles, 1958), and a shaping discourse that constantly redefines the meaning of those films and the mode of filmmaking of which they form part. Film noir can be quite tightly defined and periodised, or understood as a much more diffuse phenomenon that stretches across different art forms (encompassing advertising, comics, graphic novels, short stories and novels, painting, photography, radio drama, television and music), different periods and different countries. If we abandon attempts to define (and thereby delimit) its essential characteristics and accept noir as a mode of attention, a sensibility, a particular approach to understanding the world, then I think we are open to understanding the full range of its seductive appeal and its pervasiveness.
When the label film noir first emerged – conventionally attributed to Nino Frank in an article published in L’Écran français in August 1946 – it served to designate a group of American crime films that had both an arresting visual style and a sombre, bleak view of American life. During the six-year absence of American films during the Occupation, it seemed to French critics that American cinema had come of age, and was capable of engaging with ‘difficult’ subjects: sexuality, corruption, betrayal, trauma, psychological breakdown – a raft of social, political and historical problems that had rarely found their way into films in the pre-war period. Of course, as always, it was a case of which films were given attention rather than an objective categorisation (the films discussed were not the ones that were most popular at the box office) but that attention served to identify films noirs as a critical, oppositional mode of filmmaking, films that were ‘autopsies’ of society, to invoke the term used by director Mike Hodges to describe his British neo-noir Get Carter (1971).
That founding moment confined how film noir was understood as a seemingly uniquely American form of cinema for the next forty years. Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's Panorama du film noir américain (1955) delineated ‘a group of nationally identifiable films’ whose common features of style, subject matter and ‘atmosphere’ gave them ‘an inimitable quality’ ([1955] 2002: 1), and dismissed other European claimants.
Contents
- Byron Waldron, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Dynastic Politics in the Age of Diocletian, AD 284-311
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp v-vi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Part I - Student, 1882–1904: Learning at Home
- Beth Daugherty, Otterbein University, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 13-22
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
It is perhaps because a writer's education is so much less definite than other educations. Reading, listening, talking, travel, leisure – many different things it seems are mixed together. Life and books must be shaken and taken in the right proportions.
– ‘The Leaning Tower’ (E6 265–6)
When students walk into a school, they walk into a context providing structure and support: space divided into buildings and rooms; time divided into smaller units; curriculum naming or implying cultural values and knowledge divided into courses; pedagogy assuming how learning occurs; lessons about agreed-upon topics; and community. Teachers have training and credentials, are assigned to phases in student development, have an overall rationale and goals, and work to create learning situations.
But Virginia Stephen went to school at 22 Hyde Park Gate. There, she absorbed lessons from teachers generally untrained in a discipline or pedagogy, navigated between two positions on education for girls and constructed much of the curriculum and assignments on her own. All students piece together their educations, but Stephen, isolated and coping with fractured instruction, had to work harder to make lessons cohere. But learn her lessons she did.
Virginia Stephen's school at 22 Hyde Park Gate provided context and curricula, reflected pedagogies and represented communities. It provided many teachers in addition to her father, some within the home, some coming in, and some outside. Her primary instructors – Leslie and Julia Stephen; her brother, Thoby; her aunt, Anne Thackeray Ritchie; newspapers; libraries; King's College teachers; and Janet Case, her tutor – all helped educate the girl who became Virginia Woolf. As a student at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Virginia Stephen pieced together various curricula, pedagogies, lessons and communities, mixed ‘many different things’ together, and learned, above all else, how to create community in and through writing.
Education for Girls and Women
Virginia Stephen had a complex educational inheritance, one that shaped Virginia Woolf into an essayist compelled to leave an educational legacy. Born in 1882 to a father 50 years old and a mother in her second childbearing round, she grew up not in a late-Victorian atmosphere of values, attitudes and behaviours, but in a mid-Victorian one (‘Sketch’ 147; Gordon 23). Decades of tradition and conventional wisdom had shaped the family into which she was born, and beliefs about educating girls and women were far from settled or stable before or during her lifetime.
General Preface: Common Reader Learning, Common Reader Teaching
- Beth Daugherty, Otterbein University, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp xx-xx
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
It was the summer of 1988, I was finally there, in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection, and I asked for it first. I remember holding Virginia Stephen's 1897 diary in the palm of my hand, tears welling. What became days, weeks, years, a lifetime of transcribing began in that moment. Later that summer, I read the holograph draft of Virginia Woolf's talk at Hayes Court School, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, transfixed by the teacher I saw there. I didn't know it then, but the seed for what I came to regard as the crucial relationship between Virginia Stephen's education and Virginia Woolf's essays had been planted.
Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist is the first of two books about Woolf's essay canon. Virginia Stephen spent her apprenticeship as a common reader learning, working to weave together the disparate threads of her homeschooling, teaching and early writing. Coping with piecemeal lessons, she learned, practised and gained an education, writing the nearly 160 reviews and essays that would transform her into Virginia Woolf, a common reader teaching, an essayist who wrote 500 mature essays that strive to educate others.
Virginia Woolf's Essays: Being a Teacher, the book to follow, will show how Woolf uses her essays to welcome readers and students into the literary conversation as well as how they function as an educational laboratory for teachers. She outlines an educational philosophy, shares a curriculum, models a pedagogy and creates a community, demonstrating all the while how we might teach in our classrooms and on the page. Virginia Stephen's apprenticeship turned Virginia Woolf into an educator compelled to teach in essays that continue to guide, encourage and inspire readers, writers and teachers. In this book, Virginia Stephen, student, teacher and apprentice, studies and practises as a common reader learning; she emerges and flourishes in the second book as Virginia Woolf, essayist, educator and mentor, a common reader teaching.
5 - Pseudo-star acting in Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (1953)
- Martin Shingler
-
- Book:
- Diana Dors
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 89-98
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (hereafter, referred to as Honeymoon) is a small-scale 80-minute British comedy with all the hallmarks of a B-movie despite its talented Anglo-American cast and distinguished veteran director Maurice Elvey. As explained in Chapter 2, although well on the way to becoming a major movie personality in Britain and the States in 1953, Dors had to wait another two years before she could truly be considered a film star. Consequently, Honeymoon wasn't a Dors’ star vehicle but rather an ensemble comedy in which the American actor Bonar Colleano received first billing for his role as the main protagonist. Nevertheless, Dors outshone him and everyone else here despite maintaining an understated and naturalistic performance. The twentyone- year-old actress is spectacular in Honeymoon, which is only partly due to her youthful beauty and slender physique. In a leading role, she asserts her star qualities with a supremely self-confident performance. My focus in this chapter is therefore on how Dors performed her role in Honeymoon as if she was a major movie star.
The saga of an unnecessarily fraught and farcical honeymoon with two wives
American naval commander Laurie Vining (Bonar Colleano) arrives in England with his new bride Gillian (Diana Decker) only to have his honeymoon gatecrashed by his first wife. The glamorous model Candy Markham (Diana Dors) believes that she's still legally married to Vining on the grounds that his American-obtained divorce is not binding in Britain. Consequently, having moved into the guest room of his hotel suite, she refuses to leave until a once-promised £5,000 settlement is honoured. Vining tries to keep this from his bride, summoning his lawyer Frank Betterton (David Tomlinson) to assist him in getting rid of Candy. It subsequently transpires that the sexually inhibited Frank has always been in love with Candy, who eventually falls for his bumbling boyish charms.
Prior to getting his heart's desire, Frank is repeatedly humiliated. Having been forced to spend a night in a bathtub, for instance, he wakes to find that the taps have been turned on, soaking his borrowed garish pyjamas. Meanwhile, Laurie is exhausted after spending much of the night standing on his head while attempting to avoid his new wife's sexual advances.
Notes on Contributors
- Edited by Aakshi Magazine, Amber Shields
-
- Book:
- ReFocus
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp viii-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
13 - Gilda de Abreu's O Ébrio as a Unique Intermedial Project
- Edited by Lúcia Nagib, University of Reading, Luciana Corrêa de Araújo, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil, Tiago de Luca, University of Warwick
-
- Book:
- Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 228-242
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Released in 1946, Gilda de Abreu's O Ébrio (The Drunkard) is one of Brazil's biggest box-office hits of all time, reaching the mark of 8 million spectators by the end of that decade (Paiva 1989; Pizoquero 2006). Featuring Abreu's husband, the tenor Vicente Celestino, in the title role, O Ébrio resulted from a partnership between the couple and the production company Cinédia. The company was owned by Adhemar Gonzaga, filmmaker and editor of the famous magazine Cinearte, and was the first major Brazilian studio to be built on the industrial model of Hollywood. It produced Brazilian classics, such as Ganga bruta (Rough Gang, Humberto Mauro, 1933) and Bonequinha de seda (Silk Little Doll, Oduvaldo Vianna, 1936), as well as successful carnival comedies. The O Ébrio project satisfied Cinédia's key industrial demands, by consolidating Vicente Celestino's position in the star system, meeting the highest technical level in the hands of Brazil's top film professionals (including the experienced cinematographer Afrodísio de Castro) and paying back the major investment with popular acclaim.
The film's storyline revolves around the fortunes and misfortunes of Gilberto (Vicente Celestino). A voiceover introduces him as an impoverished medical student, wandering aimlessly through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, hungry and homeless. His relatives have turned their backs on him, yet, thanks to the help of a priest, he manages to win a musical contest and become a radio star. After graduating, Gilberto marries the opportunist nurse Marieta (Alice Archambeau), who flirts continuously with his cousin José (Rodolfo Arena). José seduces Marieta, with an eye on Gilberto's fortune, and persuades an accomplice, the dancer Lola (Júlia Dias), to pass herself off as Gilberto's lover. As a result of this set-up, Marieta leaves her husband for José, who steals her money and flees to the US, leaving her and Lola behind. In his despair after finding himself abandoned and betrayed by his wife, the doctor–singer swaps his identity with that of a recently deceased homeless man and goes back to roaming the streets, now as a drunkard. At the film's end, José's three victims meet at a dingy bar. Gilberto sings the film's theme song, telling the story of his life. On encountering Marieta, now penniless, he forgives her but decides to follow his own path, in solitude and poverty.
Preface
- Martin Shingler
-
- Book:
- Diana Dors
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp ix-xii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
A spectacularly audacious and voluptuous forty-nine-year-old Diana Dors caught my attention when I was a shy and skinny fifteen-year-old. She first fascinated me in 1980 as the ball-breaking Commander wearing a camp military uniform in the television comedy series The Two Ronnies, simultaneously sexy and scary as the head of a matriarchal state police force, a supreme subjugator of men. The following year, I was mesmerised by her appearance as a glitzy fairy godmother in the pop music video for Adam and the Ants’ hit single Prince Charming. Here, while Adam Ant repeatedly sang ‘ridicule is nothing to be scared of ’, Dors waved her starry wand in the air and transformed his rags into ‘glad-rags’ so that he could attend the queerest of costume balls.
Now I can see why Diana Dors was so perfectly cast as Adam Ant’s fairy godmother. For her role here is not simply to make his dreams come true but to inspire him to love himself and be proud. In so doing, this pop promo capitalised on Dors’ reputation as a survivor despite disaster and derision, as someone who remained unashamed even when acknowledging personal failings and professional failures. Many people craved this kind of chutzpah in the early eighties. Her bravado was truly inspirational in an individualistic and highly competitive world. Yet I didn't know then that she’d been a major international sex symbol in the 1950s. Nor did I appreciate her skills as an actress, until I saw her some years later in Yield to the Night (Lee Thompson 1956). Watching this film, I marvelled at her transformation from a glamorous blonde salesgirl into a plain drab prisoner awaiting execution. Yet what was just as astonishing was the sheer intensity of her performance, notably in scenes with co-star Yvonne Mitchell as the caring guard with whom Dors’ doomed Mary Hilton discovers a close bond of mutual understanding and sympathy, possibly even love.
It took several viewings of Yield for me to realise that this film is not a straightforward story of a young woman who loved a man so much that she committed murder to avenge his death.
4 - Aristotle
- Gideon Baker, Griffith University, Queensland
-
- Book:
- Questioning
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 41-52
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
IF PLATO’S QUESTION WAS the question of identity, of what stays the same in change, then Plato’s student, Aristotle (384–322 BCE), asked about change (kinēsis) itself. In particular, Aristotle wanted to conceive of change without splitting the world in two as Plato had done. Instead of Plato’s two worlds – a world of change and a world of ideas that don’t change – Aristotle sought to think change and identity together in the same world – our world ‘where everything comes to be from what is’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.6.1071b). After all, the world of change is not entirely in motion – things change in predictable rather than random ways. While an acorn may or may not become an oak, it cannot become a willow tree. And not only in nature is change other than flux. The block of marble does not become a statue by chance. The potential of the marble to become a statue requires a sculptor to give it form. In short, ‘actuality is the organization (logos) of that which is potentially’ (Aristotle, De Anima 2.4.415b, emphasis added).
But if everything comes to be from what is, then the question of how change is possible remains. In his Metaphysics (12.2.1069b), Aristotle suggests an answer: things come to be from what is, but from what is potentially, not from what is in actuality. This idea of generation means that, for Aristotle (Metaphysics 12.3.1070a), we can do without Plato’s ideas. Particular human beings, for example, appear not thanks to the idea ‘human’ but because they are capable of generating other such beings (indeed, all living or ‘ensouled’ things share this capacity ‘to make another such as itself’ [De Anima 2.4.415a30]). Plato’s ideas cannot explain how such change comes about (Metaphysics 12.6.1071b).
Rather than starting from their ideas, then, we need to question beginning from particular things: ‘Because what is sure and better known as conforming to reason comes to be from what is unsure but more apparent’ (De Anima 2.2.413a). Our questions need to be inductive (working up from particular things), not deductive (working down from first principles). Sticking with the example of particular human beings: for Aristotle (De Anima 2.2.414a), we need to invert Plato’s approach since ‘the body is not the actuality of the soul, but the soul is the actuality of some body’.
9 - Neo-Noir and ‘Becoming-Murderer’ in Tonia Marketaki’sJohn the Violent 182
- Edited by Anna Poupou, National and Capodistrian University of Athens, Nikitas Fessas, Universiteit Gent, Belgium, Maria Chalkou, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece
-
- Book:
- Greek Film Noir
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 182-198
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Ioannis o Viaios/John the Violent is a 1973 black-and-white film written and directed by the renowned Greek auteur Tonia Marketaki. It was made just before the fall of the Greek junta (1967–74) and in line with the modernist aesthetics and politics of New Greek Cinema. This chapter explores John the Violent in the breach between Gilles Deleuze's movement-images and time-images, and attempts to make readable the intersection between the neo-noir aesthetics and the existential and political power of the film. I argue that the neo-noir sensibility of the film lies not in the classic noir presentation, investigation and solution of a crime, but in the multiple fascination with the ‘powers of the false’ (Deleuze 2005b: 122–50) in crime and cinema. John, the psychologically troubled but charming protagonist, seems to have murdered a woman, as he willingly confesses to the police. While this might or might not be true in the fictional narrative, I will attempt to illustrate how Marketaki undermines narrative verisimilitude and how John the Violent is less the story of a psycho-killer and more a neo-noir about the existential and political processes of a becoming-murderer.
The film opens with a crime committed around midnight in a street in Athens: a young woman is stabbed to death by someone who disappears in the dark. During the interrogation of the witnesses by the police, the spectator gets bits of contradictory information about when and how the murder was committed. The witnesses expose in flashbacks and voiceovers different versions of what happened. Then the victim is identified and presented: Eleni worked as an assistant in a woman's underwear shop, and had a fiancé who lived with his mother and sister whom she used to visit and attend on every day. Through police interrogations of Eleni's colleagues, relatives and friends, who are similarly presented through voiceovers and flashbacks, with increasing curiosity we learn about her financial situation, intimate life and sexual habits. In the next few days, parts of this information hit the newspapers, spiced up with rumours and hearsay. The witnesses’ and the press's narratives reflect, in a crude way, all the dominant gender and class stereotypes of the time. The filmic strategy of presenting the facts through fragmented narratives and different points of view, often used in noir and neo-noir films, questions from the very beginning the possibility of accessing the truth.
11 - Hong Kong and Athens: Contested Spaces of the Global and the Local in the Neo-Noir of John Woo and Alexis Alexiou
-
- By Yun-hua Chen
- Edited by Anna Poupou, National and Capodistrian University of Athens, Nikitas Fessas, Universiteit Gent, Belgium, Maria Chalkou, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece
-
- Book:
- Greek Film Noir
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 216-231
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Noir as the Contested Intersection between the Global and the Local
Since its inception, the production of film noir in the US context has drawn thematic and aesthetic inspiration from European and other world cinemas; in return, the noir elements, established by US noir, have also had a significant impact on European and world cinemas. Like a chain reaction, these European and world cinemas, which once found inspiration in Anglo-American film noir, would invigorate Hollywood neo-noir later on. This is what Fay and Nieland (2009: 9, 68, 109) call ‘global film noir’, and what Desser (2003: 516) calls ‘global noir’.
Through this lens, John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Alexis Alexiou's Tetarti 04:45/Wednesday 04:45 (2015) form an interesting pair of examples that can be used to look into the dynamics between the global and the local within the genre framework. An almost three-decade gap separates their creation, but there is a remarkable affinity between the two films. On the one hand, Alexiou pays tribute to John Woo. On the other, as I argue in this chapter, this affinity can be read as a strategy on Alexiou's part to connect with international neo-noir, and to relate the local concerns of Greek noir to global ones; this affiliation through noir demonstrates global interdependencies theorised by Sassen (2001: 267), Appadurai (1996: 32–5) and Featherstone (1996: 65) under the term ‘the global’, as well as Hardt and Negri's ‘Empire’ (2000: 39).
While reflecting on these two films’ temporal-spatial intersection between the local and the global in the background, this chapter will discuss transcultural and local aspects of A Better Tomorrow and Wednesday 04:45, as well as the globalised noir space. I will first contextualise both films in their respective sociopolitical and economic conditions. I will also discuss the films’ interaction with noir aesthetics and genre conventions, before moving on to examine the proliferation of non-places in Hong Kong and Athens, and the creation of globalised cities.
Film noir as a term as well as its scope have long been contested (Park 2011: 2; Schrader [1972] 2003: 230; Bordwell 1998: 77). The term was coined in the early post-war years by French critics Nino Frank (1946) and Jean-Pierre Chartier (1946);
1 - Bright (1946–9)
- Martin Shingler
-
- Book:
- Diana Dors
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 13-30
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Diana Dors appeared in an assortment of pictures during the late 1940s. Apart from one or two exceptions, the majority were pretty undistinguished and in most of them she was cast in small supporting roles with limited screen time and little scope for subtle or complex characterisation. She did, however, have the good fortune to work with some seasoned filmmakers such as George King, the director of her debut film The Shop at Sly Corner (1946), as well as rising new talents such as Ken Annakin, who directed her in Holiday Camp (1947) and Here Come the Huggetts (1948), among others. Nevertheless, her path to stardom was hampered by stiff competition from a multitude of talented, beautiful and revered actresses, who enjoyed great success in the post-war British film industry.
In his anthology British Stars and Stardom, editor Bruce Babington writes that the forties were ‘a great period for British female stars’, chief among them being Margaret Lockwood – the ‘British Queen of Hearts’ (2001: 95). Combining her ‘nice ordinary girl’ looks with a screen persona as a feisty and unconventional woman, Margaret Lockwood won the hearts of millions of British moviegoers, especially women, after her starring role in The Wicked Lady (Arliss 1945). If she occupied a place at the very pinnacle of British movie stardom at this time, Dors laboured away at the foothills. Having begun her film career at the age of fifteen in 1946, she became both an apprentice film actress at the Rank Organisation and a Charm School ‘scholar’ the following year.
When compared to Lockwood at this time, Dors’ film career in the forties may well be regarded as negligible. However, as discussed in this chapter, her regular appearances in British films from 1946 to 1949 enabled the young actress to evolve a distinctive screen persona, one that deserves to be recognised as a significant achievement for a teenager attempting to break into a highly competitive industry.
As explained in more detail below, older actresses such as Jean Kent and Greta Gynt were the acclaimed bad girls of British cinema during this period and they were invariably first in line for starring roles as dangerous, loose and wicked women after Margaret Lockwood. It was partly Dors’ youth that prevented a rapid elevation to stardom in the 1940s but her physical features also made her ascension to ‘starlet’ status something of a challenge.
Acknowledgements
- Murat Yasar, State University of New York at Oswego
-
- Book:
- The North Caucasus Borderland
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp viii-ix
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Preface: Common Reader Learning
- Beth Daugherty, Otterbein University, Ohio
-
- Book:
- Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp xxi-xxiv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Now I am going to get out all my books again, after I have written to the Quaker, and I am going to write in my head, where I always write immortal works, an article upon Lady Fanshawe, and I am going to walk round my desk and then take out certain manuscripts which lie there like wine, sweetening as they grow old. I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.
– Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson [7 July 1907] (L1 299)
I am a hillbilly, a hick, a ridge runner, a yokel. I don't think I’m a redneck, though people in my part of the country get called that, too. I’m from Appalachia, the hills of southeast Ohio, a village of 583 people. If I had ended my school days in the Quaker City school I started in, my graduating class would have numbered eighteen. But two schools consolidated and I graduated with forty-six other students. I remember hearing Julius Caesar read aloud in the halting voices of my classmates in English class, and we must have read a smattering of short stories and poetry in my writing class, but I don't remember reading any other literature in school. We were, however, repeatedly taught grammar, which seemed to work only for those who already knew grammar.
In graduate school seminars at Rice University, I sat at a table with students from Yale, Princeton and Johns Hopkins, wondering what the hell I was doing there. In fact, I learned much later that the department took a chance on me and my small Ohio college degree. What right did I have to discuss literature with such educated people? What right did I, a hillbilly, have to attempt a dissertation on Virginia Woolf's fiction? I am a professor emerita now. I continue to do research on Virginia Woolf, and my research focus is Woolf's essays instead of her novels because, at that low time, I happened upon Woolf's Collected Essays in the Brazos Bookstore: hardback, a different colour for each volume, $7.50 apiece for Volumes 1 and 2, $6.95 apiece for Volumes 3 and 4. I couldn't resist. I started with the first essay in the first volume, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, and didn't stop until I finished the last essay in the fourth volume, ‘The New Biography’.
1 - The Impossible Ideal: Beauty, Health and Character
- Michelle Smith, Monash University, Victoria
-
- Book:
- Consuming Female Beauty
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 August 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 29-53
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Be natural! A healthy life and mind
The best cosmetics are, you’ll surely find;
The beauty of expression, that will last
And charm, when all your other charms are past.
Be natural! God made you as you are,
And His creation you insult and mar
By being other – keeping this in view,
That Nature cannot be improved by you.
M. Hedderwick Browne, ‘To the Girls’, Girl's Own Paper (1892)Natural and healthful beauty was roundly encouraged in Victorian women's print culture. Browne's poem ‘To the Girls’, published in the Girl's Own Paper, distils the overwhelming tenor of beauty advice of the period. Through the hand of God, nature was the source of a girl's or woman's beauty, and her looks could be no more flawed than that of a flower, tree or animal. A forceful preference for the natural was informed by a reverence for God's creation in the magazine. The use of cosmetics, or slavish adherence to fashion, therefore, took on a transgressive function beyond that of simple aesthetic preference. Healthful practices and thoughts would improve the character, influencing the expression, or external repre-sentation of the internal self, and these qualities could last until old age, unlike physical beauty, which would inevitably degrade. These premises are important to account for when considering the representation of beautiful women in Victorian fiction and the beauty advice professed in women's periodicals and advice manuals.
This chapter considers how the unassailable logic about natural, healthful beauty created unmeetable expectations, fostered a culture of cosmetic secrecy and judged vanity harshly. The rhetoric of harm and danger associated with cosmetics situated them as the antithesis of health and in conflict with true, natural beauty. This generated a tension for the authors of beauty manuals who had to remain on the right side of God – as embodied by the natural – and yet somehow satisfy women readers with solutions for improving their appearance. The imagined relationship between the natural, the healthful and beauty prompted a number of men with medical backgrounds to produce advice about, or assessments of, female beauty, which carried with them the authority of their profession, and had very different motivations to female-authored beauty advice manuals.
Frontmatter
- Martin Shingler
-
- Book:
- Diana Dors
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp i-iv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
10 - Spinoza
- Gideon Baker, Griffith University, Queensland
-
- Book:
- Questioning
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 103-112
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
BARUCH SPINOZA (1632–77) IS THE first of our modern philosophers. He led the way in having the courage to question, too. For not many in Spinoza’s day dared to doubt the existence of a personal God as he did. Spinoza also doubted the notion of free will and, with it, the reality of guilt. In fact, Spinoza put the entire edifice of moral law in question. Excommunicated from a community founded on religious law and living a precarious existence in a wider society that was no less legalistic, Spinoza’s philosophy challenges the operation by which moral law assigns blame. As we shall see, this involves a radically new conception of ethics in which the question of responsibility (what should I do or not do?) is replaced with the question of capacity (what can I do or not do?).
Spinoza was only a generation younger than Descartes, who is traditionally considered the father of modern philosophy. Like Descartes, Spinoza had great faith in the power of reason. The question of how it is with the world is not something for the sages but has a set of precise, almost mathematical-like, answers. With reason liberated from the shackles of superstition, our fundamental questions lead us to answers. And being in possession of this understanding we can be free – not in the sense that we have any choice concerning how things are, but rather in our awareness of the order of things. As for the Stoics before and Nietzsche after him, the important thing for Spinoza is that our way of living affirms the way of the world rather than seeking solace in otherworldliness (worlds where things match up to the way we want them to be).
Though he lived in a time and place – Amsterdam in the seventeenth century – when the unfathomable providence of God was the answer to all difficult questions, explanations of things that seek refuge in the will of God were, for Spinoza (Ethics Part I, Appendix II), Asylum Ignorantiae – a sanctuary of ignorance. This was a very dangerous thought to harbour since God’s freedom was central both to the Reformed Protestant faith that shaped the Dutch Republic and, in a different way, also to the Rabbinical Judaism of his upbringing (the community from which he was excommunicated).
6 - A marriage of method and style in The Unholy Wife (1957)
- Martin Shingler
-
- Book:
- Diana Dors
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 14 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2022, pp 99-108
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The Unholy Wife features Diana Dors in one of her most unsympathetic roles as Phyllis Hochen, an unfaithful wife with no qualms about her husband being executed for a murder she's committed, as well as a neglectful mother who resents her only child from the moment he's born. Once life with the man she's married for security has become tedious, Phyllis plots to kill her husband Paul. Having mistakenly shot his best friend, she frames Paul for this, securing a conviction that sentences him to death. As a bad wife, negligent mother and an all-round wicked woman, Phyllis Hochen is presented in this Technicolor film noir as nothing less than a monstrous incarnation of evil. The task of embodying such a character was no mean feat given that the actress needed to foreground her wickedness without turning her into a grotesque caricature since she needed to elicit sympathy when Phyllis finds redemption in religion at the very end of the film. As discussed in this chapter, this was made more challenging for a British actress working with numerous American Method actors that not only used a range of techniques such as improvisation and ‘affective memory’ but also deemed the work of their colleagues from across the Atlantic to be old-fashioned, superficial and unemotional.
Diana Dors’ performance in her American crime melodrama displays as much composure and control as in her British farce Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (Elvey 1953) despite her character being very different and highly unsympathetic. Consolidating her signature style or idiolect, she redeployed her trademark postures when playing an archetypal femme fatale in The Unholy Wife (Farrow 1957), while also adapting her acting style to the techniques of the Method actors performing with her. Analysis of several scenes of this critically underrated movie reveals just how versatile the British star was when working in Hollywood in 1956.
Method and style
John Farrow's casting of Diana Dors and Rod Steiger in the roles of Phyllis and Paul Hochen enabled the producer-director to capitalise on the vogue for both blonde bombshells and male Method actors. While the two stars had received praise for the realism and psychological complexity of their screen performances – Steiger for On the Waterfront (Kazan 1954) and Dors for Yield to the Night (Lee Thompson 1956) – they were very different kinds of actor.