- Title
- The return of the 1920s: an examination of the twenty first century revival
- Creator
- Gibb, Dirk Andrew
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This thesis presents, frames, and analyses a corpus of films and television programs set in the 1920s, all of which have been produced in the last decade. It posits these texts as the latest in a long line of ‘returns’ to prominence of this storied decade within popular culture. It questions why such a twenty-first century resurgence of interest in the 1920s has come about, arguing that we have much to learn from these representations in seeking to grasp key origins of our ever-later modernity’s founding mass media and consumer age. In so doing, it apprehends the 1920s as a ‘protean’ decade, and this for its future-oriented energy, unfinished nature, uncontrollable generativity, diverse potential, and ongoing relevance. In the process, it seeks to discover what makes this latest return of the 1920s distinctive and in what ways it repeats overdetermined tropes that date back as far as the decade itself. In both respects, the thesis argues that the 1920s accumulatively appear to us on screen in a manner that comprises dense intertextual, audiovisual, literary, and historical layers in a state of constant realignment. In allegorical terms, it is argued that our twenty-first century present is rearticulated and questioned through this audiovisual revival of the 1920s, and that the story of our times is made more palatable, and less traumatic, by the filter of the past through the setting of what is by general consensus a key nodal point in the history of Western modernity. At the same time, the 1920s themselves were already a protean multimedia decade, forward looking and intrinsically adaptable to subsequent allegorisation, and radically open to diverse, contradictory possibilities. In order to address productively such complex historical, textual, and conceptual terrain, the thesis engages a number of academic disciplines, notably History, Film and Television Studies, and Literary Studies, drawing on and combining them in distinctive ways. It thereby seeks to demonstrate the degrees to which the audiovisual texts of the current revival reconstruct and remain faithful to, and/or distort and adapt, the historical events of the 1920s, and how previous iterations are updated by these films and television programs. In this sense, it aims to provide a work of historical accompaniment for the present day consumer of this 1920s revival, while at the same time reading the latter as a phenomenon of and for our times that seeks to understand a central chapter in the genealogy of its ever-expanding modernity as played out on screen.
- Subject
- film; television; revivals; 1920s; historical
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1407793
- Identifier
- uon:35781
- Rights
- Copyright 2019 Dirk Andrew Gibb
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 386 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |