Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature

by Dowling,Andrew

• ISBN13: 9780754603801
• ISBN10: 0754603806
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The purpose of this book is to address two principal questions: 'Was the concept of masculinity a topic of debate for the Victorians?' and 'Why is Victorian literature full of images of male deviance when Victorian masculinity is defined by discipline?'In his introduction, Dowling defines Victorian masculinity in terms of discipline. He then addresses the central question of why an official ideal of manly discipline in the nineteenth century co-existed with a literature that is full of images of male deviance. In answering this question, he develops a notion of 'hegemonic deviance', whereby a dominant ideal of masculinity defines itself by what it is not. Dowling goes on to examine the fear of effeminacy facing Victorian literary men and the strategies used to combat these fears by the nineteenth-century male novelist. In later chapters, concentrating on Dickens and Thackeray, he examines how the male novelist is defined against multiple images of unmanliness. These chapters illustrate the investment made by men in constructing male 'others', those sources of difference that are constantly produced and then crushed from within gender divide.By analysing how Victorian literary texts both reveal and reconcile historical anxieties about the meaning of manliness, Dowling argues that masculinity is a complex construction rather than a natural given.

Author Biography

Andrew Dowling is Research Manager in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vi
General Editors' Preface	vii
Acknowledgements	viii
Introduction	1	(12)
Victorian Metaphors of Manliness	13	(13)
Dickens, Manliness, and the Myth of the Romantic Artist	26	(20)
Masculinity and its Discounts in Dickens's David Copperfield	46	(16)
Homosocial Bohemia in Thackeray's Pendennis	62	(20)
Masculinity and Work in Trollope's An Autobiography	82	(14)
Masculine Failure in Gissing's New Grub Street	96	(20)
Conclusion: From Feminism to Gender Studies	116	(6)
Works Cited	122	(9)
Index	131