Synopses & Reviews
This collection provides a unique and comprehensive historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed within national literature. Through a sustained focus on the nexus between gender, sexuality, language, and literature for the construction of identity, it represents an important contribution to the theoretical understanding of key British literary texts from the perspective of masculinity studies.
Review
'[This book] undertakes an admirable exploration of the cultural construction of masculinity and masculinities as a comprehensive historical overview in British literature and culture. A thorough, cogent, and brilliantly designed collection of essays combining nuanced and subtle close readings with a relevant and varied theoretical framework.' - Therese Steffen, University of Basel and author of
Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, Drama'Horlacher's volume sets a new standard for the historical study of masculinities in British literature. Theoretically rich, historically nuanced, and covering more than six centuries, the essays in this volume illuminate the continuities and contradictions, disruptions and recuperations that characterize changing historical conceptions of the masculine. An essential volume that will set the benchmark for research in masculinity studies for years to come.' - Christopher Breu, Illinois State University and author of Hard-Boiled Masculinities
"This volume is state of the art on its subject. . . . no book has the breadth and contemporaneity that this one does. Summing Up: Recommended."—CHOICE
Review
"[A] very enjoyable and wide-ranging collection . . . [These essays] offer refreshing and, more often than not, original perspectives on a broad range of struggles for masculine identity." - Anglia
Synopsis
An in-depth analysis into the construction of male identity as well as a unique and comprehensive historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed in British literature from the Middle Ages to the present. This book is an important contribution to the emerging field of masculinity studies.
About the Author
Stefan Horlacher is a professor of English Literature at Dresden University of Technology. He has published widely on English literature as well as on masculinity studies and gender studies, media studies, psychoanalysis, and theories of the comic. His latest publications are Masculinities: Conceptions of Masculinity in the Works of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence; Gender and Laughter: Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media; 'What Makes a Woman a Woman?' - 'What Makes a Man a Man?' Constructions of Gender from an Interdisciplinary and Diachronic Perspective; and Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present.
Table of Contents
Part I: Theoretical Framework * Masculinity, Sexual Identity, and the Importance of Literature--Stefan Horlacher * The Construction of the Construction of Masculinities--Harry Brod * On Reading Men, Law, and Gender: Legal Regulation and the New Politics of Masculinity--Richard Collier * Masculinity Inside Out: The Biopolitical Lessons of Transgender and Intersex Studies--Kevin Floyd * Part II: Literature from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century * Robin, Gamelyn, and Medieval Masculine Escapism--Andrew James Johnston * Masculinity and Chivalric Prowess in Thomas Malorys Morte d'Arthur--Christoph Houswitschka * Shakespeares Rescripting of Masculinity in As You Like It--Mark Bracher * "Merit, Justice, Gratitude, Duty, Fidelity": Images of Masculinity in Autobiographies of Early Modern English Gentlewomen and Aristocrats--Gabriele Rippl * The 'Crisis' of Masculinity in Seventeenth-century England-- Michael Kimmel * Augustan Manliness and Its Anxieties: Shaftesbury and Swift--Isabel Karremann * The Male Gaze versus Sexual Ventriloquism: Masculinities in Daniel Defoe's Novels--Laurenz Volkmann * Sentimental Masculinity: Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling--Rainer Emig * Concepts of Masculinity in Victorian Crime, Detective, and Gothic Fiction--Ralf Schneider * The Props of Masculinity in Victorian Adventure Fiction--Susanne Scholz and Nicola Dropmann * Re-Reading Jude the Obscure: Patriarchal Laws, the Symbolic Order, and the Illusion of a Metaphysics of Presence--Stefan Horlacher * Part III: Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature * A Man Could Stand Up: Masculinities and the Great War--Siliva Mergenthal * From Working Class Loser Boy to Male Role Model: The Rise of the Angry Young Man--Sebastian Müller * 'Filiarchy' and the Male Principle in the Early Work of Ian McEwan--Fatemeh Hosseini * Baffled Hopes and Bad Habits: Gay Men and Romance in Novels by E. M. Forster, Tom Wakefield and Alan Hollinghurst--Berthold Schoene * Cultural Hybridity and Fluid Masculinities in the Post Colonial Metropolis: Individualized Gender Identities in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album--Meinhard Winkgens * Lad Trouble: The Crisis of Masculinity in the Fiction of Nick Hornby, John O'Farrell, and Tim Lott--Andrea Ochsner