Prosthetic Agency

Gill Plain is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews and has published extensively on war writing, mid-century British literature and film, popular culture and gender. Her books include Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2001), John Mills and British Cinema (2006), Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and 'Peace' (2013) and, as editor, British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960 (2018).

Prosthetic Agency bursts with insight. To call this book a tour de force would be to understate its accomplishment. From the smallest detail to the largest structural organization, the argument about the prosthetic nature of masculinity after the Second World War is handled with magisterial perceptiveness. Gill Plain dextrously weaves together examples from literature and film, and her analysis is all the more valuable for its comprehensive engagement with both media in the 1940s and 1950s. Prosthetic Agency sets a new standard for writing about war, recovery, and masculinity in British studies. Allan Hepburn, McGill University

• Introduction; Part I. Technology: 1. Enabling machines: Hammond Innes, Nevil Shute and technologies of rehabilitation; 2. Cinema in the sky: risk, responsibility and domestic citizenship; 3. Bad science: Nigel Balchin and the limits of technological man-making; Part II. Disability: 4. Writing rehabilitation: prosthetic autobiography and self-(re)invention; 5. Unrepresentable wounds? Nevil Shute, Hammond Innes and the legacies of damage; 6. A 'machine genius of the new aerial art': imagining Douglas Bader; Coda: of pigs and men.