BA History and Sociology

Britain’s inter-war period has been characterized as the “Long Weekend” and the “Devil’s Decades”, as contemporary writers and historians have both stressed stark divisions and contrasts in society. Images of hunger marches and dole queues have been placed alongside flappers and glamorous mill girls in ‘cheap artificial stockings, cheap short-skirted frocks, cheap coats, cheap shoes, crimped hair, powder and rouge’ (Walter Greenwood, ‘Love on the Dole’). However, more current research suggests the inter-war period was unique because of the possibilities and opportunities offered and, for instance Matt Houlbrook suggests there was a ‘profound fascination with individuals who faked it – who masqueraded as something or someone they were not–or who crossed boundaries of class, gender, race, ethnicity, or age in other ways.’ In particular, new opportunities in consumer culture provided methods of self-fashioning that were previously unavailable.

 

Restricted to History programmes, History joint honours programmes (please check your programme structure for further details).

This module is only available to students on History-owned programmes; Euro Studies programmes; and History joint honours programmes owned by other subject areas.

1. To explore the impact of World War One on British society by focusing on identity and culture

2. To examine the role of consumer culture in self-fashioning and offering individuals opportunities to perform new forms of selfhood.

3. To consider how identities could be transcended, disrupted or obscured in inter-war Britain.

4. To assess how far certain social identities were seen as problematic or dangerous and why anxieties about gender, race and sexuality were so acute in inter-war society.

• Have a wide-ranging and imaginative understanding of inter-war English society and culture
• Possess a detailed knowledge of the implications of mass consumer culture, especially in terms for social identities and self-fashioning
• Understand why and how social identities could be obscured and boundaries of class, race and gender could be transcended or disrupted in inter-war societ

• Produce informed, well-written and well-researched pieces of academic prose.
• Work effectively and creatively with a range of primary source materials, especially literary and visual sources.
• Consider the historical specificity or uniqueness of inter-war Britain, especially in terms of the new consumer opportunities and the implications for self-fashioning.

 

• Possess excellent communication and presentation skills by contributing to seminar tasks and group discussion.
• Synthesise historical data and offer informed, analytical insights based on research.
• Offer persuasive and convincing interpretations that are presented clearly to others

Essay plan

0

Essay

50%

Exam

50%

 

Essay Plan: Formative

 

Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain, (Oxford, 2004).

Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester, 2013). Carol Dyhouse, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (2011).

Matt Houlbrook, ‘“The Man with the Powder Puff” in Interwar London’, Historical Journal, 50, 1, 2007, 145 – 171. Marek Kohn, Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, (London, 1992)

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, (Originally written 1928, first published London, 1961).