British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940

PAUL DAVE Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of East London, UK STEPHEN LACEY Professor of Drama, Film and Television, University of Glamorgan, UK ROD MENGHAM Reader in Modern English Literature, University of Cambridge, UK DAVE ROLINSON Lecturer in the Department of Film, Media and Journalism, University of Stirling, UK KESTON SUTHERLAND Reader in Poetics at the University of Sussex, UK GILLIAN WHITELEY Curator and Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at Loughborough University School of the Arts, UK

• Acknowledgements List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction - 'an anthropology of ourselves' Vs. 'the incomprehensibility of the real': Making the Case for British Social Realism; D.Tucker Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social Realist Film; P.Dave Staging the Contemporary: Politics and Practice in Post-War Social Realist Theatre; S.Lacey Bad Teeth: British Social Realism in Fiction; R.Mengham 'this / is not a metaphor': The Possibility of Social Realism in British Poetry; K.Sutherland Re-presenting Reality, Recovering the Social: The Poetics and Politics of Social Realism and Visual Art; G.Whiteley Small Screens and Big Voices: Televisual Social Realism and the Popular; D.Rolinson Index

'This is an outstanding study of the histories and meanings of social realism in Britain since 1940, which is as attentive to the diversity of its forms and politics, as it is imaginative about its possibilities. The six chapters, written by leading scholars in the study of the arts, offer intellectually stimulating and sophisticated analyses of the significance of social realism in modern and contemporary British culture, from Coronation Street , Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , and Mass Observation , to The Royle Family , Tom Leonard, and Jez Butterworth. Of all the epithets used to characterise the aesthetics of postwar Britain, social realism is the most maligned and least understood. This book opens up the concepts and practices of social realism in film, drama, fiction, poetry, visual art and television to lucid, intelligent and thorough scrutiny. It sets out a brilliant new map of the cultural landscape in Britain, as challenging in its positioning of social realism as a dominant aesthetic as it is masterful in its refigurations of the very terms by which we understand that aesthetic. British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 is an essential guide to the arts in modern Britain, an inspired and dazzling intervention in the history of our cultural present.' - John Brannigan, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland