Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Cold Steel, Weak Flesh

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Cold Steel, Weak Flesh: Mechanism, Masculinity and the Anxieties of Late Victorian Empire

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>30/04/2017
<mark>Journal</mark>CULTURAL & SOCIAL HISTORY
Issue number2
Volume14
Number of pages27
Pages (from-to)155-181
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date13/01/17
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

This article considers the reception and representation of advanced military technology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. It argues that technologies such as the breech-loading rifle and the machine gun existed in an ambiguous relationship with contemporary ideas about martial masculinities and in many cases served to fuel anxieties about the physical prowess of the British soldier. In turn, these anxieties encouraged a preoccupation in both military and popular domains with that most visceral of weapons, the bayonet, an obsession which was to have profound consequences for British military thinking at the dawn of the First World War.