Picturing Home: Domestic Life and Modernity in 1940s British Film

(Hardback)

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This book examines the modes of address used to depict domestic life in a range of canonical and popular British films in the 1940s. Drawing on a wide range of evidence magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and ephemera from the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, it contextualises onscreen images of home in this period as engaging with the popular promotion of suburbia and domestic modernity in the interwar years. Picturing Home therefore provides a new reading of the ways in which British 1940s films visually convey a middlebrow vision of modernity, looking back to the interwar past as a means of imagining the postwar future: characterised by a balance between tradition and progress, domesticity and nationhood, aspirational glamour and restraint, privacy and community. -- .

Reviews

'The book provides an unusual, convincing account of English suburban life placed in the culture of the 1930s and 40s with some depth and complexity, challenging popular, hostile stereotypes. [...] provides real, convincing insights into experiences and perceptions of English suburban living during its period of greatest expansion.'
Cercles, Pat Thane, Birkbeck College London

'Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Price (Univ. of Sussex, UK) presents an engaging analysis of the intertextual relationship between the idealized images of home portrayed in 1940s British film and those depicted in magazines and displayed in Ideal Home Exhibitions of the day. She explores how these images worked to promote an idea of modernity while still holding to the notion of domestic tradition and stability. In addition, she studies the facade of the perfect lifestyle and home found in these films and the push to replicate the images on screen through magazine articles and annual home showcases, which artfully and artificially linked consumerism to middle-class/suburban happiness. Price is skillful in demonstrating how these films illustrated a longing for the pastoral, idealized Britain of old over the industrial, urban one, which recalled the war and destruction that the country wanted to move past. In this well-written and well-organized book, Price provides readers with an in-depth look at how 1940s British film navigated the call for a return to a traditional domestic normalcy while at the same time promoting the push for modernity and consumerism through an idealized image of home.
--A. F. Winstead, Our Lady of the Lake University
Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.
Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.

Author Bio

Hollie Price is a Research Fellow in Media and Film at the University of Sussex