ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that the so-called ‘Angry Young Men’ of the 1950s created the material conditions which led to the emergence of a new pattern of Northern realist texts and the commodification of working-class masculinities. The chapter engages with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger as a means of contextualising the significance of the ‘Angry Young Men’ title. It continues to analyse the character of Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Arthur Machin in David Storey’s This Sporting Life as exemplars of an emergent working-class masculinity. It suggests that the success of these texts (and others within the pattern) and their film adaptations fed into the continued commodification of working-class masculinities and provided the origins of a ‘working-class moment’ within British culture.
