Eye on the flesh

When do our bodies cease to be ours alone? At what point and under what political and social circumstances do our bodies become the subtle, but no less complete, inscription of the will of another person, an institution, or a state? Maurizia Boscagli analyzes the early-twentieth-century transformation of the male body from Forster's "unassuming black-coated clerk" and Eliot's "young man carbuncular" to the brutal, tanned musculature of fascism.

She argues that this new male superman corporeality corresponded precisely with the rise of early mass consumer culture - generally associated with the female - and the advent of fascism. The mechanistic, polished, and vigorous male creature inevitably became an object of political and economic obedience and conformity and, in the concept of "the national body," a fighting machine.

. Boscagli takes the reader on a highly informed literary and cultural excursion through European culture between 1880 and 1930.