‘Dwelling at Peace’: Europeanization and the marketing of Alpine tourism in post-war Britain

The Alps were a prominent feature in post-war British consumer culture and one of the key tourist destinations in the years leading up to the 1975 European Communities membership referendum. Through an analysis of holiday company Thomas Cook’s promotional materials, this article demonstrates how the Alps were represented as a region free from conflict, in which different groups lived in harmony and which offered a healthy, community-based way of life. These images not only offered a sense of an alternative to perceived deficiencies in post-war British society but also offered a sense of the possibilities of being at home in Europe

‘Chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork’: Science fiction, cyclicality and the new dark age during the Cold War

Although science fiction of the Golden Age in the 1940s and the 1950s is often associated with narratives of progress, this article demonstrates that there was a fascination within this period with narratives of cyclicality, rather than progress, narratives in which social and scientific systems collapse back into new dark ages and/or re-emerge out of such new dark ages. Furthermore, the article explores how these narratives were mobilized in relation to the Cold War and particularly the ways in which nationalist agendas were seen as repressing the international exchange of ideas that many science fiction writers regarded as central to science. However, these stories did not simply oppose politics with science so that the former was associated with ignorance and repression and the latter with knowledge and liberation. On the contrary, these stories were preoccupied with conceptual crises, in which one system of thought was overthrown by another. In other words, these were stories of scientific revolution rather than linear progress and they often presented all systems of thought as potentially restrictive. In short, these cyclical narratives were a reminder of a challenge from which many science fiction writers believed that science could not escape, a challenge that would therefore continually reassert itself: the narratives demonstrated that scientists not only needed to take responsibility for their discoveries but also to recognize that the advancement of science did not inevitably lead to (or even go hand in hand with) social, political or cultural enlightenment

'Most stories of this type': Genre, horror and mystery in the silent cinema

An examination of ‘horror’ in the silent period, one of many genres that is only supposed to have emerged in the 1930s. Through an analysis of press coverage, the article examines a clear vocabulary that was used to describe a specific ‘type’ of film at the time. It also illustrates that ‘horror’ was explicitly used as a generic noun to name this ‘type’ but that, given that ‘horror’ was also a negative term used in censorship campaigns, this term was often avoided, except when ‘horror’ was clearly understood as a ‘hot’ genre. Consequently, this genre was more commonly described as ‘mystery,’ a term that included both ‘horror’ and ‘detective stories,’ terms that were largely seen to be indistinguishable in the period, when both were understood as featuring investigations into the ‘mysterious,’ ‘strange’ and ‘eerie.’ In other words, ‘mystery’ staged a confrontation between rationality and irrationality and in a way that negotiated the perceived transitions from Victorianism to Modernity at the time

'Another, More Sinister Reality': Class, Youth and Psychopathology from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to Endless Night

This article analyses how the protagonists of films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1959), The Collector (1965), Blow Up (1966), Twisted Nerve (1968) and Endless Night (1972) were understood in relation to debates over the supposed perils of the new affluence and the erosion of class distinctions that it was presumed to entail. In particular it examines the terms in which these issues were discussed within contemporaneous reviews of the films, terms that were insistently psychological. These protagonists, as well as, to a certain extent, the actors who played them, were seen as representing a nightmare image of a ‘new’ working class that no longer ‘knew its place’, and as manifesting psychological problems that were associated with this intermediate status. Their psychologies were interpreted by many critics as being distinguished by a sense of isolation from external reality and by a hostile relationship to the world characterised by a psychopathic lack of empathy. Such concerns could be seen as establishing certain parallels between working-class realism and the contemporaneous horror film, and indeed the reviews cited in this article demonstrate that working-class realism and horror were seen as having shared points of interest in the 1960s, points that have often been repressed by the tendency to compartmentalise British cinema history into separate or even opposed ‘traditions’

Sexed up: theorizing the sexualization of culture

This paper reviews and examines emerging academic approaches to the study of ‘sexualized culture’; an examination made necessary by contemporary preoccupations with sexual values, practices and identities, the emergence of new forms of sexual experience and the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay. The paper maps out some key themes and preoccupations in recent academic writing on sex and sexuality, especially those relating to the contemporary or emerging characteristics of sexual discourse. The key issues of pornographication and democratization, taste formations, postmodern sex and intimacy, and sexual citizenship are explored in detail. </p

Tele-branding in TVIII: the network as brand and the programme as brand

In the era of TVIII, characterized by deregulation, multimedia conglomeration, expansion and increased competition, branding has emerged as a central industrial practice. Focusing on the case of HBO, a particularly successful brand in TVIII, this article argues that branding can be understood not simply as a feature of television networks, but also as a characteristic of television programmes. It begins by examining how the network as brand is constructed and conveyed to the consumer through the use of logos, slogans and programmes. The role of programmes in the construction of brand identity is then complicated by examining the sale of programmes abroad, where programmes can be seen to contribute to the brand identity of more than one network. The article then goes on to examine programme merchandising, an increasingly central strategy in TVIII. Through an analysis of different merchandising strategies the article argues that programmes have come to act as brands in their own right, and demonstrates that the academic study of branding not only reveals the development of new industrial practices, but also offers a way of understanding the television programme and its consumption by viewers in a period when the texts of television are increasingly extended across a range of media platforms

The allure of otherness: transnational cult film fandom and the exoticist assumption

Academic scholarship addressing transnational cult fandom, particularly Western cult fans forming attachments to films outside their cultures, has frequently addressed the issue of exoticism. Much attention has been paid to how Western fans are problematically drawn to artefacts outside of their own cultures because of exotic qualities, resulting in a shallow and often condescending appreciation of such films. In this article, I critique a number of such articles for merely assuming such processes without proffering sufficient supporting evidence. In fact, I argue that a number of such exotic-oriented critiques of transnational cultism are actually guilty of practising what they preach against: an insufficient contextualization of fandom and a tendency to downplay the messiness of empirical data in favour of generalized abstractions. Further, I argue that the constant critique of fans as avoiding contextualization has not only been overstated but stringently used as a yardstick to denigrate fan engagements with texts as improper. As such, fans are often ‘othered’ within such articles, a process mirroring the ways they are accused of othering distant cultural artefacts