Literature and Cultural Criticism in the 1950's - The Feeling Male Body

Susan Brook argues that the history of Left literary and cultural criticism in Britain is characterized by a systematic failure to recognize the way it has been shaped by issues of gender, and that it has been marked by a history of romanticizing the feeling male body and excluding the "inauthentic" feminine. This study charts the origins of the exclusion in the 1950s focusing on the fifties cultural criticism associated with the New Left; the writing of the so-called "angry young man" (such as Amis's Lucky Jim and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger); and the much overlooked category of women's writing of the period.