Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction
Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction

Author: Marco Wan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-11-10

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1134843879

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How do lawyers, judges and jurors read novels? And what is at stake when literature and law confront each other in the courtroom? Nineteenth-century England and France are remembered for their active legal prosecution of literature, and this book examines the ways in which five novels were interpreted in the courtroom: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Paul Bonnetain’s Charlot s’amuse, Henry Vizetelly’s English translation of Émile Zola’s La Terre, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. It argues that each of these novels attracted legal censure because they presented figures of sexual dissidence – the androgyne, the onanist or masturbator, the patricide, the homosexual and the lesbian – that called into question an increasingly fragile normative, middleclass masculinity. Offering close readings of the novels themselves, and of legal material from the proceedings, such as the trial transcripts and judicial opinions, the book addresses both the doctrinal dimensions of Victorian obscenity and censorship, as well as the reading practices at work in the courtroom. It situates the cases in their historical context, and highlights how each trial constitutes a scene of reading – an encounter between literature and the law – through which different forms of masculinity were shaped, bolstered or challenged.

American Masculine
American Masculine

Author: Shann Ray

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2011-06-21

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 155597032X

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Winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Fiction, a muscular debut that reconfigures the American West The American West has long been a place where myth and legend have flourished. Where men stood tall and lived rough. But that West is no more. In its place Shann Ray finds washedup basketball players, businessmen hiding addictions, and women fighting the inexplicable violence that wells up in these men. A son struggles to accept his father's apologies after surviving a childhood of beatings. Two men seek empty basketball hoops on a snowy night, hoping to relive past glory. A bull rider skips town and rides herd on an unruly mob of passengers as he searches for a thief on a train threading through Montana's Rocky Mountains. In these stories, Ray grapples with the terrible hurt we inflict on those we love, and finds that reconciliation, if far off, is at least possible. The debut of a writer who is out to redefine the contours of the American West, American Masculine is a deeply felt and fiercely written ode to the country we left behind.

The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture
The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture

Author: Lydia R. Cooper

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-26

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1000504956

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Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel
Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel

Author: Josef Benson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-07-16

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1442237619

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Issues of race, gender, women’s rights, masculinity, and sexuality continue to be debated on the national scene. These subjects have also been in the forefront of American literature, particularly in the last fifty years. One significant trend in contemporary fiction has been the failure of the heroic masculine protagonist. In Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel: Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, andJames Baldwin,Josef Benson examines key literary works of the twentieth century, notably Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), Song of Solomon (1977), and Another Country (1960). Benson argues that exaggerated masculinities originated on the American frontier and have transformed into a definition of ideal masculinity embraced by many southern rural American men. Defined by violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia, these men concocted or perpetuated myths about African Americans to justify their mistreatment and mass murder of black men after Reconstruction. As Benson illustrates, the protagonists in these texts fail to perpetuate hypermasculinities, and as a result a sense of ironic heroism emerges from the narratives. Offering a unique and bold argument that connects the masculinities of cowboys and frontier figures with black males, Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel suggests alternative possibilities for American men going forward. Scholars and students of American literature and culture, African American literature and culture, and queer and gender theory will find this book illuminating and persuasive.

Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction
Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction

Author: Peter Ferry

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-08-21

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1317743156

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Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction is an interdisciplinary study that presents masculinity as a key thematic concern in contemporary New York fiction. This study argues that New York authors do not simply depict masculinity as a social and historical construction but seek to challenge the archetypal ideals of masculinity by writing counter-hegemonic narratives. Gendering canonical New York writers, namely Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and Don DeLillo, illustrates how explorations of masculinity are tied into the principal themes that have defined the American novel from its very beginning. The themes that feature in this study include the role of the novel in American society; the individual and (urban) society; the journey from innocence to awareness (of masculinity); the archetypal image of the absent and/or patriarchal father; the impact of homosocial relations on the everyday performance of masculinity; male sexuality; and the male individual and globalization. What connects these contemporary New York writers is their employment of the one of the great figures in the history of literature: the flâneur. These authors take the flâneur from the shadows of the Manhattan streets and elevate this figure to the role of self-reflexive agent of male subjectivity through which they write counter-hegemonic narratives of masculinity. This book is an essential reference for those with an interest in gender studies and contemporary American fiction.

Masculine Style
Masculine Style

Author: D. Worden

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2013-10-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781137360694

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This book argues for the importance of 'cowboy masculinity,' from late nineteenth-century dime novels, to the writings of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, and Owen Wister, and analyzes the democratic politics of masculinity in American literature and positions the American West as central to modernism.

Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television
Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television

Author: Brian Baker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-07-28

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1501320092

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While masculinity has been an increasingly visible field of study within several disciplines (sociology, literary studies, cultural studies, film and tv) over the last two decades, it is surprising that analysis of contemporary representations of the first part of the century has yet to emerge. Professor Brian Baker, evolving from his previous work Masculinities in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000, intervenes to rectify the scholarship in the field to produce a wide-ranging, readable text that deals with films and other texts produced since the year 2000. Focusing on representations of masculinity in cinema, popular fiction and television from the period 2000-2010, he argues that dominant forms of masculinity in Britain and the United States have become increasingly informed by anxiety, trauma and loss, and this has resulted in both narratives that reflect that trauma and others which attempt to return to a more complete and heroic form of masculinity. While focusing on a range of popular genres, such as Bond films, war movies, science fiction and the Gothic, the work places close analyses of individual films and texts in their cultural and historical contexts, arguing for the importance of these popular fictions in diagnosing how contemporary Britain and the United States understand themselves and their changing role in the world through the representation of men, fully recognising the issues of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age. Baker draws upon current work in mobility studies and in the study of masculinities to produce the first book-length comparative study of masculinity in popular culture of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Masculinities, Modernist Fiction and the Urban Public Sphere
Masculinities, Modernist Fiction and the Urban Public Sphere

Author: Scott McCracken

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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At the turn of the last century the public culture of Europe's cities underwent a transformation that changed both gender relations and European fiction. This book charts the changing representations of masculinity in modernist fiction in the context of the four most influential cities -- London, Dublin, Paris and Prague.

From the Delivered to the Dispatched
From the Delivered to the Dispatched

Author: Harriet Stilley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-26

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0429771606

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From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction (1969-1977) focuses on masculinity in late twentieth-century American fiction. This rigorous study shows the ways post-war American authors engage with the tension between capitalist consumer culture and traditional national conceptions of American manhood. Drawing on examples from the works of prolific contemporary American writers, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison and Michael Herr, Stilley investigates hypermasculine male violence, the classical and grotesque body, as well as specific regional themes such as the Western frontier, the American Adam, the Southern Gothic and the Suburban Gothic.

The Well of Loneliness
The Well of Loneliness

Author: Radclyffe Hall

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1473374081

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This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.