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Assesses how cinematic biographies of key figures reflect and shape what it means to be British.
Winner of the 2019 SAMLA Studies Book Award for Edited Collections presented by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Rule, Britannia! surveys the British biopic, a genre crucial to understanding how national cinema engages with the collective experience and values of its intended audience. Offering a provocative take on an aspect of filmmaking with profound cultural significance, the volume focuses on how screen biographies of prominent figures in British history and culture can be understood as involved, if unofficially, in the shaping and promotion of an ever-protean national identity. The contributors engage with the vexed concept of British nationality, especially as this sense of collective belonging is problematized by the ethnically oriented alternatives of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nations. They explore the critical and historiographical issues raised by the biopic, demonstrating that celebration of conventional virtue is not the genre's only natural subject. Filmic depictions of such personalities as Elizabeth I, Victoria, George VI, Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, Iris Murdoch, and Jack the Ripper are covered.
"…Rule, Britannia! offer[s] thought-challenging case studies that discuss a wide range of theoretical questions, opening up a large spectrum of valuable leads for research on both the biopic genre in general and its specificity in British film." — Cercles
"This exceptional collection offers new ways of looking at these films as films, as well as a fresh approach to British history as a cultural whole." — Wheeler Winston Dixon
Illustrations
Preface
R. Barton Palmer and Homer B. Pettey
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: The Kray Twins and Biographical Media
Homer B. Pettey
Part I. Royalty and Politicians
2. The Biopic, the Nation, and Counter-History in the Films of Derek Jarman
Marcia Landy
3. Elizabeth I and the Life of Visual Culture
Homer B. Pettey
4. Gender and Authority in the Queen Victoria Films
Jeffrey Richards
5. The Re-Centering of the Monarch in the Royal Biopic: The Queen and The King’s Speech
Giselle Bastin
6. The Iron Lady: Politics and/in Performance
Linda Ruth Williams
Part II. Artistic Biography
7. Casting the British Biopic: The Barretts of Wimpole Street 1934–1957
Deborah Cartmell
8. The Muse’s Tale: Rewriting the English Author in The Invisible Woman
Hila Shachar
9. A Matter of Life and Art: Artist Biopics in Post-Thatcher Britain
Jim Leach
10. Closer and Closer Apart: Questioning Identities in Richard Eyre’s Iris
Mark Luprecht
Part III. Crimes and Warfare
11. Carving the National Body: Jack the Ripper
Dominic Lennard
12. Leslie Howard’s The First of the Few (1942): The Patriotic Biopic as Star Vehicle
R. Barton Palmer
13. Who the Man Who Never Was, Was
Murray Pomerance
14. Secrecy and Exposure: The Cambridge Spies
Erica Sheen
Bibliography
Selected Film, Television, Recordings, and Radio
Contributors
Index