Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present

by Horlacher, Stefan

• ISBN13: 9780230115095
• ISBN10: 0230115098
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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 Malory’s Morte d'Arthur--Christoph Houswitschka * Shakespeare’s 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