This book examines the male Romantics' versions of poetic authority in theory and practice in the context of their involvement in the political debates of Regency Britain and argues that their response to Burke's gendered discourse about power effected radical changes in the definitions of masculinity and femininity. It portrays their influence on each other as a series of unstable struggles and alliances in which the formulation of an authoritative masculinity was a political as well as an aesthetic issue. The author investigates the writers' portrayals of women and their collaborations with women writers and throws new light on their nature poetry by relating it to their reactions to the sexual and political scandals of the Regency.
This volume addresses the growing obsolescence of traditional constructions of masculine identity in popular romantic comedies by proposing an approach that combines gender and genre theory to examine the ongoing radical reconstruction of gender roles in these films. Alberti creates a unified theory of gender role change in the movies that combines the insights of both poststructuralist gender and narrative genre theory, avoiding binary approaches to the study of gender representation. He establishes the current "crises" in both gender representation and genre development within romantic comedies as examples of experimentation and change towards narratives that feature more egalitarian and less essentialist constructions of gender.
This book illuminates Jane Austen’s exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists. This book reveals that Austen pioneers and celebrates a new vision of masculinity that could complement the Romantic desire for agency, individualism and selfhood embodied in her heroines. Rewriting desirable masculinity as an internalised, psychologically complex and authentic gender identity – a model of manhood that drives the ongoing appeal and cultural power of her men in the twenty-first century – Austen explores both the challenges and the opportunities for male selfhood, romantic love and feminine agency. Jane Austen’s Men is among the first full-length works to explore Austen's male protagonists as textual constructions of masculinity. Sarah Ailwood reveals the depth of Austen's engagement with her predecessors and contemporaries, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West and Jane Porter, on critical questions of masculinity and its relationship to femininity and narrative form. This book illuminates in new ways Jane Austen’s ambitions for the novel, and the political power of the courtship romance genre in the Romantic era.
Combining queer theory with theories of affect, psychoanalysis, and Foucauldian genealogy, Romanticism, Gender, and Violence: Blake to George Sodini theorizes performative melancholia, a condition where, regardless of sexual orientation, overinvestment in gender norms causes subjects who are unable to embody those norms to experience socially expected (‘normal’) gender as something unattainable or lost. This perceived loss causes an ambivalence within the subject that can lead to self-inflicted violence (masochism, suicide) or violence toward others (sadism, murder). Reading a range of Romantic poetry and novels between 1790-1820, but ultimately moving beyond the period to show its contemporary cultural relevance through readings of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, and George Sodini’s 2009 murder-suicide case, this study argues that we need to move beyond focusing on bullying, teens, and LGBT students and look at our cultural investment in gender normativity itself. Doing so allows us to recognize that the relationship between non-normative gender performance and violence is not simply a gay problem; it is a human problem that can affect people of any sex, sexuality, age, race, or ethnicity and one that we can trace back to the Romantic period. Bringing late 18th-century novels into conversation with both canonical and lesser-known Romantic poetry, allows us to see that, as people whose performance of gender occasionally exceeds the normal, we too often internalize these norms and punish ourselves or others for our inability to adhere to them. Contrasting paired chapters by male and female authors and including sections on failed romantic coupling, melancholic femininities, melancholic masculinities, failed gender performance and madness, and ending with a section titled After Romanticism, this study works on multiple levels to complicate previous understandings of gender and violence in Romanticism while also offering a model for contemporary issues relating to gender and violence among people who ‘fail’ to perform gender according to social norms.
Taking twenty women writers of the Romantic period, Romanticism and Gender explores a neglected period of the female literary tradition, and for the first time gives a broad overview of Romantic literature from a feminist perspective.
Hegel possessed : reading the gothic in the phenomenology of mind -- The male romantic poet as gothic subject : Keats's Hyperion and The fall of hyperion : a dream -- Sharing gothic secrets : Byron's The Giaour and Lara -- "This dream it would not pass away" : Christabel and mimetic enchantment -- The gothic romance of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess
This book offers a culturally informed understanding of the literary significance of landscape in the Romantic period. Jacqueline Labbe argues that the Romantic period associated the prospect view with masculine ideal, simultaneously fashioning the detailed point of view as feminized. An interdisciplinary study, it discusses the cultural construction of gender as defined through landscape viewing and investigates property law, aesthetic tracts, conduct books, travel narratives, artistic theory, and the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Ann Francis, Dorothy Wordsworth and others.
This interdisciplinary study analyzes the ways in which signs of masculinity have been performed across a wide variety of contexts and genres - including literature, classical ballet, sports, rock music, films and computer games - from the early nineteenth century to the present day.
Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance seeks to open a lively and accessible discussion between critical studies of men and masculinities and popular romance studies, especially its continued interest in what Janice Radway has called "the purity of his maleness." Popular romance novels, perhaps more than any other genre, explore sexuality and gender, creating an ideal space in which to consider and explore theoretical models that think seriously about gender. The romance novel has long been criticized and celebrated by feminist critics. How can these novels maintain, according to some, feminist ideals, while also upholding what Raewyn Connell has long theorized as "hegemonic masculinity"? This volume is an original and important contribution examining the previously underexamined nexus of masculinity and popular romance studies. It will be of key interest to undergraduates and postgraduates in Masculinities, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Literary Studies, and highly relevant to courses in Masculinity Studies, Pop Culture Studies, Queer Studies and Sexuality Studies.
