Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Dummitt, Chris (1973-....)
Titre(s) : Unbuttoned [Texte imprimé] : a history of Mackenzie King's secret life / Christopher Dummitt
Publication : Montreal (Québec) : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2017]
Description matérielle : xxii, 326 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-319) and index
"This book is a history of the afterlife of Mackenzie King in print and in Canadian
culture. When King died in 1950 little was known publicly about his eccentric private
life; King's final will declared that his voluminous diary should be destroyed and
its contents were carefully guarded during the research and writing of his official
biography. Yet twenty five years later, his diaries were publicly available and King's
private life was the subject of energetic media discussion, including coverage of
CP Stacey's A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King, the republication
of H S Ferns and Bernard Ostry's The Age of Mackenzie King: Rise of the Leader, and
the appearance of the third volume of the official biography by H. Blair Neatby. King
increasingly came to be known in public as Weird Willie, the prime minister who communed
with ghosts and cavorted with prostitutes. This book tells the story of this change
and what it reveals about public attitudes towards politicians. It does so in part
through detailed archival research into the specific decisions of Mackenzie King's
literary executors along with close textual analysis of writing about and reporting
on Mackenzie King. It also reads this story against the context of the cultural changes
of the long 1960s and changing attitudes towards privacy, secrecy, morality, individualism
and the rights revolution. The increasingly irreverent approach to Mackenzie King,
the book argues, can be explained by the rise of a therapeutic culture of the self
that increasingly based truth claims in individual experience, authenticity, and rights.
In other words, the Weird Willie phenomenon is a microcosm of a fundamental historical
transformation: the end of the era of the statesman."
Issued also in electronic format.
Sujet(s) : King, William Lyon Mackenzie (1874-1950) -- Dans les médias
King, William Lyon Mackenzie (1874-1950) -- Opinion publique
Culture politique -- Canada -- 1800-....
Indice(s) Dewey :
971.05 (23e éd.) = Histoire - Canada - 1867-....
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780773548763. - ISBN 0773548769. - ISBN 9780773549388 (erroné). - ISBN 9780773549395
(erroné)
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb46578734s
Notice n° :
FRBNF46578734
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
Table des matières : Part 1: King, then and later ; Changing tastes ; Death of a statesman ; Part 2:
keeping secrets (or trying to) ; Psychic newsflash ; The official story ; Striking
an unhappy medium ; Part 3: no one could fool the people so long ; Statesman or
politician? ; Blame Freud ; Ferns and Ostry ; Official secrets ; Part 4: one the
precipice ; End of an era ; Close-up ; Ravenous for the remaining courses ; Final
spasm of hypocrisy ; To open or not to open ; Part 5: the people unfooled ; Weird
Willie ; Victorianitis ; The cover-up is the story ; The greatest prime minister?
