Katherine Snyder's study explores the significance of the bachelor narrator, a prevalent but little-recognised figure in premodernist and modernist fiction by male authors, including Hawthorne, James, Conrad, Ford and Fitzgerald. Snyder demonstrates that bachelors functioned in cultural and literary discourse as threshold figures who, by crossing the shifting, permeable boundaries of bourgeois domesticity, highlighted the limits of conventional masculinity. The very marginality of the figure, Snyder argues, effects a critique of gendered norms of manhood, while the symbolic function of marriage as a means of plot resolution is also made more complex by the presence of the single man. Bachelor figures made, moreover, an ideal narrative device for male authors who themselves occupied vexed cultural positions. By attending to the gendered identities and relations at issue in these narratives, Snyder's study discloses the aesthetic and political underpinnings of the traditional canon of English and American male modernism.
Bachelors, Bastards, and Nomadic Masculinity is, firstly, a thematic exploration of bachelor figures and male bastards in literary works by Guy de Maupassant and André Gide. The coupling of Maupassant and Gide is appropriate for such an analysis, not only because of their mutual treatment of illegitimacy, but also because each writer represents varieties of bachelors and bastards from disparate social classes and subcultures, each writing during contiguous moments of socio-legal changes particularly related to divorce law and women’s rights, which consequently have great influence on the legal destiny of illegitimate or “natural” children. Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804 provides the legal (patriarchal) framework for the period of this study of illegitimacy, from about 1870 to 1925. The Civil Code saw numerous changes during this period. The Naquet Law of 1884, which reestablished limited legal divorce, represents the central socio-legal event of the turn of the century in matters of legitimacy, whereas the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the First World War furnish chronological bookends for this book. Besides through history, law, and sociology, this book treats illegitimacy through the lens of various branches of gender and sexual theory, particularly the study of masculinities, and a handful of other important critical theories, most importantly those of Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Todd Reeser, Charles Stivale, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Bachelors and bastards are two principal players in the representation of illegitimacy in Maupassant and Gide, but this study considers the theme of illegitimacy as extended beyond simple questions of legitimate versus illegitimate children. The male bastard is only one of the "Counterfeit" characters examined in these authors' fictional texts. This book is divided into three parts which consider specific thematic elements of their "bastard narratives". Part One frames the representation in fiction of bachelor figures and how they contribute to, or the roles they play in, instances of illegitimacy. Part Two springs from and develops the metaphor of the "counterfeit coin," whether represented by a bastard son, an affected schoolboy, a false priest, or a pretentious littérateur. Part Three explains the concept of "nomadic masculine" practices; such practices include nomadic styles of masculinity development as well as the bastard's nomadism.
"This is a highly recommended purchase for undergraduate, medium-sized, and large public libraries wishing to provide a substantial introduction to the field of men′s studies." --Reference & User Services Quarterly "Pleasing layout and good cross-references make Carroll′s compendium a welcome addition to collections serving readers of all ages. Highly recommended." --CHOICE "An excellent index, well-chosen photographs and illustrations, and an extensive bibliography add further value. American Masculinities is well worth what would otherise be too hefty a price for many libraries because no other encyclopedia comes close to covering this growing field so well." --American Reference Books Annual American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia is a first-of-its-kind reference, detailing developments in the growing field of men′s studies. This up-to-date analytical review serves as a marker of how the field has evolved over the last decade, especially since the 1993 publication of Anthony Rotundo′s American Manhood. This seminal book opened new vistas for exploration and research into American History, society, and culture. Weaving the fabric of American history, American Masculinities illustrates how American political leaders have often used the rhetoric of manliness to underscore the presumed moral righteousness and ostensibly protective purposes of their policies. Seeing U.S. history in terms of gender archetypes, readers will gain a richer and deeper understanding of America′s democratic political system, domestic and foreign policies, and capitalist economic system, as well as the "private" sphere of the home and domestic life. The contributors to American Masculinities share the assumption that men′s lives have been grounded fundamentally in gender, that is, in their awareness of themselves as males. Their approach goes beyond scholarship which traditionally looks at men (and women) in terms of what they do and how they have influenced a given field or era. Rather, this important work delves into the psychological core of manhood which is shaped not only by biology, but also by history, society, and culture. Encapsulating the current state of scholarly interpretation within the field of Men′s Studies, American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia is designed to help students and scholars advance their studies, develop new questions for research, and stimulate new ways of exploring the history of American life. Key Features - Reader′s Guide facilitates browsing by topic and easy access to information - Extensive name, place, and concept index gives users an additional means of locating topics of interest - More than 250 entries, each with suggestions for further reading - Cross references direct users to related information - Comprehensive bibliography includes a list of sources organized by categories in the field Topics Covered - Arts, Literature, and Popular Culture - Body, Health, and Sexuality - Class, Ethnic, Racial, and Religious Identities - Concepts and Theories - Family and Fatherhood - General History - Icons and Symbols - Leisure and Work - Movements and Organizations - People - Political and Social Issues About the Editor Bret E. Carroll is Associate Professor of History at California State University, Stanislaus. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1991. He is author of The Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America (1997), Spiritualism in Antebellum America (1997), and several articles on nineteenth-century masculinity.
While he is best known for his Jeeves and Bertie Wooster stories, P.G. Wodehouse was a prolific writer who penned many other novels, stories, and musical comedy libretti, the latter of which played an enormous role in the development of American musical theater. This collection re-examines Wodehouse in the context of recent scholarship on the middlebrow, attending to his self-conscious relationship to the literary marketplace and his role in moving musical comedy away from vaudeville’s lowbrow associations towards the sophistication of the Wodehouse style. The focus on the middlebrow creates a critical context for serious critical consideration of Wodehouse’s linguistic playfulness and his depictions of social class within England. The contributors explore Wodehouse’s fiction and libretti in reference to philosophy, depictions of masculinity, World War I Britain, the periodical market, ideas of Englishness, and cultural phenomena such as men’s fashion, food culture, and popular songwriting. Taken together, the essays draw attention to the arbitrary divide between high- and middlebrow culture and make a case for Wodehouse as a writer whose games with language are in keeping with modernist experimentation with artistic expression.
The novels of Henry James are filled with ghosts, but most of them escape dramatic treatment. These elusive specters are the voices of precursors that haunt his narratives, compromising their constitutive freedom. The Strange Freedom is an examination of the ways James’s fiction is prepossessed by some major voices of the English literary tradition: those of Shakespeare, Richardson, Fielding, Gibbon, Thackeray, and Dickens. This subtextual arrogation sets constrains to the unfolding, in James’s narratives, of liberal and romantic freedom—it places limits both to the absolute exemptions of aesthetic interest and to radical Bohemian abandon. But these constrains and limits can be regarded, dialectically, as the enabling conditions of the very liberty they imperil. Drawing on recent research on the spectral dynamics and indirections of literary influence by scholars like Adrian Poole, Philip Horne, Nicola Bradbury, Tamara Follini, and Peter Rawlings, but also on earlier deconstructive work by John Carlos Rowe, Prepossessing Henry James offers a speculative account of the way James is simultaneously resourced and restrained by his sources. Along the way, we discover how Hamlet’s ghost instills in James a fantasy of mental autonomy, or how he adapts Gibbon’s Enlightened narrative to inhibit civic liberty with images of female sacrifice. We see the governess in The Turn of the Screw possessed by the specter of Richardson’s Pamela, exposing social freedoms with liberal brutality. We encounter Gray, in The Ivory Tower, striving to obtain personal freedom by repressing Dickensian "figures, monstruous, fantastic." And, finally, we recognize how much The Ambassadors owes to the ambiguous manner of Thackeray. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
The modern idea of Victorians is that they were emotionless prudes, imprisoned by sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection only within the bounds of matrimony—if at all. And yet, a wealth of evidence contradicting this idea has been hiding in plain sight for close to a century. In Manly Love, Axel Nissen turns to the novels and short stories of Victorian America to uncover the widely overlooked phenomenon of passionate friendships between men. Nissen’s examination of the literature of the period brings to light a forgotten genre: the fiction of romantic friendship. Delving into works by Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and others, Nissen identifies the genre’s unique features and explores the connections between romantic friendships in literature and in real life. Situating love between men at the heart of Victorian culture, Nissen radically alters our understanding of the American literary canon. And with its deep insights into the emotional and intellectual life of the period, Manly Love also offers a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century America’s attitudes toward love, friendship, marriage, and sex.
The myth of the Victorian family remains a pervasive influence within a contemporary Britain that perceives itself to be in social crisis. Nostalgic for a golden age of "Victorian values" in which visions of supportive, united families predominate, the common consciousness, exhorted by social and political discourse, continues to vaunt the "traditional, natural" family as the template by which all other family forms are gauged. Yet this fantasy of family, nurtured and augmented throughout the Victorian era, was essentially a construct that belied the realities of a nineteenth-century world in which orphanhood, fostering, and stepfamilies were endemic. Focusing primarily on British children's texts written by women and drawing extensively on socio-historic material, The Fantasy of Family considers the paradoxes implicit to the perpetuation of the domestic ideal within the Victorian era and offers new perspectives on both nineteenth-century and contemporary society.
The Physics of Possibility traces the sensational birth of mathematical physics in Victorian literature, science, and statistics. As scientists took up new breakthroughs in quantification, they showed how all sorts of phenomena—the condition of stars, atoms, molecules, and nerves—could be represented as a set of probabilities through time. Michael Tondre demonstrates how these techniques transformed the British novel. Fictions of development by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and others joined the vogue for alternative possibilities. Their novels not only reflected received pieties of maturation but plotted a wider number of deviations from the norms of reproductive adulthood. By accentuating overlooked elements of form, Tondre reveals the novel’s changing identification with possible worlds through the decades when physics became a science of all things. In contrast to the observation that statistics served to invent normal populations, Tondre brings influential modes of historical thinking to the foreground. His readings reveal an acute fascination with alternative temporalities throughout the period, as novelists depicted the categories of object, action, and setting in new probabilistic forms. Privileging fiction’s agency in reimagining historical realities, never simply sanctioning them, Tondre revises our understanding of the novel and its ties to the ascendant Victorian sciences.
Expanding our understanding of the possibilities and challenges inherent in the expression of same-sex desire before the Civil War, David Greven identifies a pattern of what he calls ’gender protest’ and sexual possibility recurring in antebellum works. He suggests that major authors such as Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne consciously sought to represent same-sex desire in their writings. Focusing especially on conceptions of the melancholia of gender identification and shame, Greven argues that same-sex desire was inextricably enmeshed in scenes of gender-role strain, as exemplified in the extent to which The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym depicts masculine identity adrift and in disarray. Greven finds similarly compelling representations of gender protest in Fuller’s exploration of the crisis of gendered identity in Summer on the Lakes, in Melville’s representation of Redburn’s experience of gender nonconformity, and in Hawthorne’s complicated delineation of desire in The Scarlet Letter. As Greven shows, antebellum authors not only took up the taboo subjects of same-sex desire and female sexuality, but were adept in their use of a variety of rhetorical means for expressing the inexpressible.
This book scrutinizes the genre of the author-as-character with respect to three broad issues--authorship, the posthumous, and cultural revisionism--that arise in reading such works from a contemporary perspective. Late twentieth-century fiction "postmodernizes" romantic and modern authors not only to understand them better, but also to understand itself in relation to a past (literary tradition, aesthetic paradigms, cultural formations, etc.) that has not really passed. Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, Peter Ackroyd's The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton, Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Colm Toibin's The Master, and Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence--"the mighty dead" (Harold Bloom) are brought back to life, reanimated and bodied forth in new textual bodies that project a post-modern understanding of the author as a historically and culturally contingent subjectivity constructed along the lines of gender, sexual orientation, class, and nationality. Laura E. Savu is a lecturer at the University of Bucharest.
