Paul R. Deslandes. Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920

Abstract

Abstract Paul Deslandes, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Vermont, has produced a study of undergraduate life at Oxford and Cambridge between 1850 and 1920 which, as he himself declares, ‘explicitly and self-consciously relates the study of Oxford and Cambridge to the study of professionalisation, imperialism, gender relations, adolescence, sexuality, and politics’ (pp. xii–xiii). To relate these two studies, he aims to examine how undergraduates saw themselves during this period, and the ways in which they constructed a world of elite maleness in which they lived during their university years.