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D. L. Le Mahieu, The History Man on Television: Ideology and Mediated Embodiment, Adaptation, Volume 10, Issue 1, 1 March 2017, Pages 127–140, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apx003
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Abstract
In early 1981, BBC2 presented a four-part adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man published in 1975. Reviewers noted how television altered Bradbury’s satiric critique of academic radicalism. An ironic, anti-subjectivist novel became a more disturbing humanist narrative that buttressed the neo-liberal critique of Marxism. This essay attempts to show how mediated embodiment translated the abstractions of language and ideology into something more existentially specific and politically damaging. It also seeks to demonstrate how changes in the cultural landscape during the 1970s unexpectedly transformed the meaning of Bradbury’s satire when broadcast on television.
