The Struggle of the Male Self
A New Left Activist and His 1961 Diary
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10067646 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Celia Hughes (Deutsches Historisches Institut Rom, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 898-925 |
| Publication date | 2015-09-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of British Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/jbr.2015.118 |
| OpenAlex | W2604503201 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
This article examines the 1961 diary of a new left young activist to explore his fractured sense of personal and political self. At the height of the Cold War, John Hoyland was an undergraduate at London's University College, living with his Communist Party family and active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). His intensely political world notwithstanding, Hoyland's diary reveals that interior life troubled his every day and shaped much of his thinking. Hoyland's self-conscious narrative illuminates self-making, male heterosexuality, generation, and relationships and cultures in the early 1960s British Left. He experienced himself as fragmented and struggled to negotiate his conflicting identities. He felt torn between older models of socialist identity and morality, his hedonism associated with the beatnik metropolitan scene, and his project of personal self-improvement. His diary offers rare insight into the intimate thoughts and feelings of one New Left young man at a time when political, social, and sexual codes and cultures were in transition before the emergence of feminist sexual politics. The article examines the identities Hoyland held as a socialist, sexual, and domestic male subject; it considers how his emotional world and relationships were shaped by his metropolitan landscapes, consisting of CND marches, Communist Party meetings, urban youth spaces, and the parental home; and it discusses Hoyland as a writer and the sense of selfhood the diary helped to make possible
Art · Communism · Disarmament · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US
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Baby-Boomers to ‘Beanstalkers’
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Hidden Fathers? The Significance of Fatherhood in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain
Re-defining British morality
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Splitting in unsent letters
The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain
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Tears, Tantrums, and Bared Teeth
Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Postwar Britain
Middle-class Socialism
Hopeful Traveller
Scandalous Events
Embodying emotion sensing space
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| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |