Homer B. Pettey & R. Barton Palmer 
Rule, Britannia! 
The Biopic and British National Identity

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.

Inhoudsopgave

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

Over de auteur

Homer B. Pettey is Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at the University of Arizona. His books include
Film Noir and
International Noir, both coedited with Palmer.
R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and Director of the World Cinema program at Clemson University. His books include
Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity (coedited with William H. Epstein);
Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor (coedited with David Boyd); and
Hitchcock’s Moral Gaze (coedited with Pettey and Steven M. Sanders), all published by SUNY Press.