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A blistering, brilliant and utterly original explanation of the Englishness of English pop culture in the twentieth century.An ambitious mould-breaking book on Englishness which abandons the false distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in favour of a borderless world where pop music and sculpture, literature and film, TV and painting are all accorded the same respect, and are part of the same vision.Here is the triumphant vindication of the alienated suburban dandy.A cast of thousands, a gallery of Britain’s finest and lariest, including: the Pet Shop Boys, Evelyn Waugh, the Fall, T-Rex, Larkin, EM Forster, Powell & Pressburger, Pink Floyd, Dexy’s, 2-Tone, the Jam, Virginia Woolf, The Carry On Films, The Slits, Bowie, Kate Bush, Fun Boy Three, Wyndham Lewis, The Human League, Rachel Whiteread, Buzzcocks, Graham Greene, Alan Bennett, Sillitoe, X-Ray Spex, Mark Almond, etc, etc.
Michael Bracewell investigates the elusive nature of Englishness by examining the intersection of twentieth-century pop culture, high art, and suburban identity. Drawing on his background as a cultural critic and novelist, Bracewell dismantles the traditional barriers between elite and popular creative output. He argues that a unified, borderless vision of English creativity emerges when one considers figures as diverse as Virginia Woolf and the Pet Shop Boys within the same cultural framework.
What You Will Find
This work is regarded as a dense, idiosyncratic exploration of British identity that prioritizes stylistic synthesis over traditional chronological history. The text serves as a specialized reference for readers interested in the aesthetic connections between disparate movements in twentieth-century English art and music.
Page Count:
256
Publication Date:
2009-08-01
Publisher:
Flamingo
ISBN-10:
0007333773
ISBN-13:
9780007333776
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