CFP: Male Troubles: Television Period Drama and Competing Narratives of Masculinity

The portrayal and interrogation of masculinity has formed an important part of period drama on the small screen since the 1960s. Given that the audience for costume drama has been traditionally largely female, however, this has tended to be overlooked in favour of a focus on the central female characters that were so key to televisual history in the decades that followed. As a result, even the male lead, by the 1990s, was important largely as a focus of the female (or homoerotic) gaze (for example, Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy).   In recent years, however, new forms of historical fictions on television have begun to foreground and examine “maleness” in exciting new ways. Neo-Victorian Gothic fictions like Ripper Street (2012-) and Penny Dreadful (2014-)represent masculinity at its darkest and most predatory, while more traditionally “heritage” series like Downton Abbey (2010-) and Mr. Selfridge (2013-) portray masculinity in crisis, at a moment 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.  The success of Poldark and Outlander, and of other recent adaptations like ITV’s “bromance” detective drama Grantchester (2014-) displays the viewing public’s increasing appetite for different narratives of masculinity.

This collection seeks essays on the intersection of masculinity and British TV costume dramas produced in the 21^st century– with  references to earlier programmes (such as Golden Age dramas like Upstairs, Downstairs) only when necessary.

Suggested topics and programmes include, but are not limited to:

• Male bodies as colonizer/colonized (Banished; Indian Summers; Outlander)
• Male Rape and Wounded Masculinity (Outlander)
• Neo-Victorian Bromance and the Crime Drama (Ripper Street)
• Monstrous Masculinity (Penny Dreadful)
• Rural Working Class Masculinity (The Village)
• Forbidden Desires: the Priest-Detective (Grantchester)
• Gangland’s Wounded Warriors (Peaky Blinders)
• Buggery in Bloomsbury (Life in Squares)
• Cold War newsmen (The Hour)
• Male viewers and fandom

Please send a 500 word abstract and brief biography by October 30, 2015  to:

Julie Anne Taddeo at taddeo@umd.edu

And Katherine Byrne at k.byrne@ulster.ac.uk

And James Leggott, james.leggott@northumbria.ac.uk