Powell and Pressburger’s War

Greg M. Colón Semenza is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA. His books include How to Build a Life in the Humanities (2015), The English Renaissance in Popular Culture (2010), Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities (2005; 2nd ed. 2010), Milton in Popular Culture (2006), and Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance (2004). He has published numerous essays on film and adaptation.Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. is Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University, USA. He is the author of four monographs, including Shakespeare and British World War Two Film (2022), Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment (2012), Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (2005), and The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (1998).

• IntroductionPart One1. “You are English. I am German. We are enemies”: Anticipating Propaganda in The Spy in Black2. “Taking the War Against Hitler”: Blockade and Blackout in ContrabandPart Two3. 49th Parallel and the Dangerous Interpretability of Wartime Propaganda4. From “We Can Take It” to “V for Victory”: Agency, Gender, and Propaganda in One of Our Aircraft is Missing5. “England Isn’t as Bad as All That”: Propaganda and Censorship in The Life and Death of Colonel BlimpPart Three6. “The Values That We Are Fighting For”: Reconciling Tradition and Modernity in A Canterbury Tale7. Building Up a New Britain: Scotland and Post-War Reconstruction in I Know Where I’m Going!8. “Conservative by Nature, Labour by Experience”: The Propaganda of Futurity in A Matter of Life and DeathCodaIndex

Greg M. Colón Semenza and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.’s detailed exploration of Powell and Pressburger’s wartime films stands out in its clarity of thought, expression and in the thoroughness of the historical research on display. We get rich analyses of the major wartime feature films, and the authors persuasively tease out the complex tensions they reveal between art and propaganda. There are valuable insights, too, into the way Powell and Pressburger point towards the challenges and possibilities of postwar reconstruction. In this well-crafted book, Semenza and Sullivan ably show that they know where they are going.