Picturing home: Domestic life and modernity in 1940s British film

by Hollie Price

Overview

Picturing home examines the depiction of domestic life in British feature films made and released in the 1940s. It explores how pictorial representations of home onscreen in this period re-imagined modes of address that had been used during the interwar years to promote ideas about domestic modernity. Picturing home provides a close analysis of domestic life as constructed in eight films, contextualising them in relation to a broader, offscreen culture surrounding the suburban home, including magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and displays at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. In doing so, it offers a new reading of British 1940s films, which demonstrates how they trod a delicate path balancing prewar and postwar, traditional and modern, private and public concerns.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526138200
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	01/19/2021
Series:	Studies in Popular Culture
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Introduction: ‘’Mid pleasures and palaces’
1 ‘Tea Table Politics’: mapping the industrial working-class home
2 Pastoral images: capturing ‘A Landscape from Within’
3 Dream palaces: transforming the domestic Interior
4 Interior lives: imagining private visions of home
Conclusion: ‘The best of both worlds’

Bibliography
Index

Editorial 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.

From the Publisher