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.
Standing up for gentlemen who prefer to avoid matrimony, Terry Reed explores, explains and defends the unsteady reputation of wondrous bachelordom against its traditionally soiled reputation, its questionable eccentricities, its ill-comprehended motivations and its ostensibly nefarious ends.
"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.
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.
Intimate Violence explores the consistent cold war in Hitchcock's films between his heterosexual heroines and his queer characters, usually though not always male. Decentering the authority of the male hero, Hitchcock's films allow his female and queer characters to vie for narrative power, often in conflict with one another. These conflicts eerily echo the tense standoff between feminism and queer theory. From a reparative psychoanalytic perspective, David Greven merges queer and feminist approaches to Hitchcock. Using the theories of Melanie Klein, Greven argues that Hitchcock's work thematizes a constant battle between desires to injure and to repair the loved object. Greven develops a theory of sexual hegemony. The feminine versus the queer conflict, as he calls it, in Hitchcock films illuminates the shared but rivalrous struggles for autonomy and visibility on the part of female and queer subjects. The heroine is vulnerable to misogyny, but she often gains an access to agency that the queer subject longs for, mistaking her partial autonomy for social power. Hitchcock's queer personae, however, wield a seductive power over his heterosexual subjects, having access to illusion and masquerade that the knowledge-seeking heroine must destroy. Freud's theory of paranoia, understood as a tool for the dissection of cultural homophobia, illuminates the feminine versus the queer conflict, the female subject position, and the consistent forms of homoerotic antagonism in the Hitchcock film. Through close readings of such key Hitchcock works as North by Northwest, Psycho, Strangers on a Train, Spellbound, Rope, Marnie, and The Birds, Greven explores the ongoing conflicts between the heroine and queer subjects and the simultaneous allure and horror of same-sex relationships in the director's films.
Dippel reviews social circumstances leading up to conflicts from the American Civil War through the Vietnam War and the current clash with Islamic fundamentalists, and explores how tensions over gender roles affect men's willingness to go to war.
This book explores images of single and married men in C.B. Brown's Monthly Magazine and concludes that Brown used his periodical as a vehicle for validating bachelorhood as a viable alternative form of masculinity.
From the country's beginning, essayists in the United States have used their prose to articulate the many ways their individuality has been shaped by the politics, social life, and culture of this place. The Cambridge History of the American Essay offers the fullest account to date of this diverse and complex history. From Puritan writings to essays by Indigenous authors, from Transcendentalist and Pragmatist texts to Harlem Renaissance essays, from New Criticism to New Journalism: The story of the American essay is told here, beginning in the early eighteenth century and ending with the vibrant, heterogeneous scene of contemporary essayistic writing. The essay in the US has taken many forms: nature writing, travel writing, the genteel tradition, literary criticism, hybrid genres such as the essay film and the photo essay. Across genres and identities, this volume offers a stirring account of American essayism into the twenty-first century.
Samuel Butler, Victorian against the Grain is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that provides a critical overview of Butler's career, one which places his multifaceted body of work within the cultural framework of the Victorian age.
In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, both thematically and structurally, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional “therapeutic” form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well an equally powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of “health”—what Wright refers to as a “hygienic” narrative—both in personal and domestic conduct and in social interaction of the individual within the community.
