Publisher's Synopsis
Analyzing the early-20th-century transformation of the male body, from Forster's "unassuming black-coated clerk" and Eliot's "young man carbuncular" to the brutal, tanned musculatures of fascism, the author argues that this new male superman-corporeality corresponded precisely with the rise of early mass-consumer culture (generally associated with the female) and the advent of fascism. She contends that this mechanistic, polished and vigorous male creature became inevitably an object of political and economic obedience and conformity, and - in the concept of "the national body" - a fighting machine.;Taking a literary and cultural excursion through European culture between 1880 and 1930, the book stops to examine Oscar Wilde and "The Picture of Dorian Gray", the Good War and the poet Rupert Brooke, Baden-Powell and the British boy scout, the films "King Kong" and "Blonde Venus", Mussolini and the spectacle of fascism, Jacob Epstein and "The Rockdrill", the marble athletes ringing Rome's Foro Italico Stadium, and the primitive in Lawrence's "The Plumed Serpent".
