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Cecil Beaton's Romantic Toryism and the Symbolic Economy of Wartime Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

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References

1 Quoted in Garner, Philippe and Mellor, David Alan, Cecil Beaton (London, 1994), 45Google Scholar.

2 For a suggestive appraisal of the emergence of modern “celebrity,” Laura Nym Mayhall, “The Prince of Wales Encounters Clark Gable: Anglo-American Celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s” (paper given at North American Conference on British Studies, Portland, OR, October 2003).

3 For different perspectives on 1939–45 as a “People's War,” particularly the term's implication of a leveling effect on British society, see Calder, Angus, The People's War: Britain, 1939–1945 (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Smith, Harold L., ed., War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War (Manchester, 1986)Google Scholar; Hinton, James, Women, Social Leadership and the Second World War: Continuities of Class (Oxford, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 Quoted in ibid., 248.

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26 In this form, of course, romantic Toryism had potential affinities with fascism, intimations that also help to account for Beaton's eagerness to contribute to the war effort. For the complex contiguities between “progressive” aesthetic practice and “conservative” political ideology, see Hewitt, Andrew, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA, 1993), and Goslan, Richard J., ed., Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture (Hanover, NH, 1992)Google Scholar.

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33 Mellor, “Beaton's Beauties,” 9–45.

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39 IWM, CBM 2475.

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41 “The Uniform for the Job,” Vogue, January 1944, 44–45.

42 Vogue, August 1942, 23–30. See also Kirkham, Pat, “Fashioning the Feminine: Dress, Appearance and Femininity in Wartime Britain,” in Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War, ed. Gledhill, Christine and Swanson, Gillian (Manchester, 1996)Google Scholar.

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46 Moreover, recent work on another World War Two photographer has suggested that “documentary realist” is itself a problematic term. See Stephen Brooke, “War and the Nude: The Photography of Bill Brandt in the 1940s,” in this issue.

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58 See, e.g., his discussion of “Photographing Royalty,” in Photobiography, 187–218.

59 Mellor, “Beaton's Beauties,” 54.

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85 Beaton, Near East, 87.

86 IWM, CBM 1499.

87 Beaton, Winged Squadrons, 30; Beaton, Years Between, 100.

88 That such preferences were shared by other gay men in this period is suggested by studies of gay male cinema icons. For example, Medhurst, Andy, “Dirk Bogarde,” in All Our Yesterdays: Ninety Years of British Cinema (London, 1986), 346–54Google Scholar. Also see his “Can Chaps Be Pin-Ups? The British Male Film Star in the 1950s,” Ten-Eight 17 (1985).

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