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A Masculine Romance: The sentimental bloke and Australian culture in the war - and early interwar years
Bellanta, Melissa
Bellanta, Melissa
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Abstract
The Sentimental Bloke was a hugely popular multi-media phenomenon in Australia during the First World War and early interwar years. I explore the work as a heterosexual “masculine romance”: a love story expressing heterosexual romantic feeling from a masculine point of view and in a self-consciously masculine way. The Bloke phenomenon demonstrates that “ordinary” Australian men were more interested in certain forms of romantic popular culture than previously allowed. It also points to the fact that avowedly masculine constructions of romantic feeling were emerging in this period in response to criticism of elaborate Victorian-era expressions of romance on the one hand, and of commodified approaches to romantic love on the other. This point has implications for romance studies, which has paid little attention to the concept or even the possibility of masculine romance. In Australia, there was an insistent emphasis on plainness and straightforwardness as the hallmarks of a sturdily masculine approach to romance in the 1910s and 1920s. My hope is that this discussion will prompt other romance scholars to consider the particular inflexions given to masculine constructions of romance in other localities in the same period.
Keywords
C. J. Dennis, gender of romantic love, masculinity, popular culture, Raymond Longford, sentimentality
Date
2014
Type
Journal article
Journal
Journal of Popular Romance Studies
Book
Volume
4
Issue
2
Page Range
1-20
Article Number
ACU Department
School of Arts and Humanities
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
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DOI
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Open Access Status
Open access
License
CC BY 4.0
File Access
Open