Claydon, E. Anna

Dr. Anna Claydon is Lecturer in Media and Communication, Department of Media and Communication (Centre for Mass Communications Research)at the University of Leicester and is working on her next book, Imagination and Memory: The Cinema’s Theory of Mind to be published by The Edwin Mellen Press in 2007.

Representation of Masculinity in British Cinema of the 1960s: Lawrence of Arabia, the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and the Hill

2005 0-7734-5972-3
This book challenges the received wisdom of approaches to both a “crisis” in masculinity and British cinema. Taking four key case study films which can be said to typify areas of British film production during the 1960’s, this book opens out how widely difference methodologies can be used to analyse the British film as text in contrast to the primarily contextual analyses of British cinema of the period found elsewhere. In addition, she argues that the dominant mode of analyzing masculinity, via a “crisis” needs to be re-examined and the terminology returned to its original sense rather than the pop psychological comprehension which places the blames for any problem with masculinity upon feminism. As such, she seeks to reframe a “crisis” of masculinity (the psycho-sexual) as a crisis of masculinism (the socio-political) whilst concurrently examining individual masculinities as an abjected relationship based upon the social and the Other rather than the feminist and the emasculated.