Conflicting Masculinities ― Men in Television Period Drama

Whether it is a half-naked Ross Poldark working in the fields or Lord Grantham in front of Downton Abbey, representations of historical masculinity currently dominate our television screens. In recent years diverse forms of period drama have begun to foreground and examine “maleness” in exciting new ways. Neo-Victorian Gothic fictions like Ripper Street and Penny Dreadful represent masculinity at its darkest and most predatory, while gritty anti-heritage series like The Village and Peaky Blinders portray masculinity in crisis, at moments in history in which patriarchy was under attack by external forces like World War One, the rise of first wave feminism, and the breakdown of Empire. This collection of new writing on twenty-first century drama begins with the depiction of the eighteenth century in programmes as different as Outlander and Banished, moves on to dark visions of the nineteenth century like The Frankenstein Chronicles, before dealing with the representation of the traumatic impact of war in programmes from Downton Abbey to Home Fires, and closing with the unconventional 1950s masculinity of David Walliams in the recent adaptation of Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime. Essays explore the very different types of maleness offered by contemporary television, while tracing certain key male roles and figures: detectives, criminals, soldiers, conscientious objectors, lovers and family men. Sometimes violent, often troubled, and always complex, these male characters struggle with the demands of family and economic and moral survival in a rapidly changing world. As they explore the intersections of class, race, and masculinity, these dramas restore lost or marginalized voices to both history and the small screen and, equally important, appeal to contemporary desires, fears, and expectations. With contributions from scholars of film and media, literature, history, and gender studies, this book will appeal to academics as well as fans of British television.

Katherine Byrne is a lecturer in English at the University of Ulster, where she teaches nineteenth and twentieth century literature and women's writing. She has published articles and book chapters on Victorian fiction and medicine, and on adaptation and television, especially on the adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell for the small screen. Her previous monograph was Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination and she has just completed a book on Neo-Edwardian period drama, called Edwardians on Screen: From Downton Abbey to Parade's End.Julie Anne Taddeo teaches British history at University of Maryland, College Park, USA. She is the author of Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity and has edited and co-edited the following collections: Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey ;Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology ; Catherine Cookson Country: On the Borders of Legitimacy, Fiction and History and The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV & History . She is an associate editor for The Journal of Popular Television and is Secretary of the Middle Atlantic Conference on British Studies (MACBS).James Leggott teaches film and television at Northumbria University, UK. He has published on various aspects of British film and television culture and is the co-editor of Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey. He is the principal editor of the Journal of Popular Television.