Women Constructing Men Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750 - 2000

by Frantz, Sarah S. G.; Rennhak, Katharina; Ailwood, Sarah; Bode, Katherine; Burwick, Frederick; Emig, Rainer; G. Frantz, Sarah S.; Haggerty, George E.; Harde, Roxanne; Laflen, Angela; Maurer, Shawn Lisa; McWilliams, Ellen; Pearson, Sara; Richter, Virginia

• ISBN13: 9780739133651
• ISBN10: 0739133659
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-03
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

Female novelists have always invested as much narrative energy in constructing their male characters-heroes and villains-as they have in envisioning their female protagonists, but this fact has received very little scholarly attention to date. In Women Constructing Men, scholars from Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States begin to sketch the outline of a new literary history of women writing men in the English-speaking world from the eighteenth century until today. By rediscovering forgotten texts, rereading novels by high-canonical female authors, refocusing the interest in well-known novels, and analyzing contemporary narrative constructions of masculinity, the contributing scholars demonstrate that female authors create male characters every bit as complex as those of male authors.

Author Biography

Sarah S. G. Frantz is assistant professor of English at Fayetteville State University. Katharina Rennhak is professor of English at the Bergische Universitt Wuppertal.

Table of Contents

Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750-2000: An Introduction	p. 1
Happy Men?: Mid-Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and Ideal Masculinity	p. 11
Male Privilege in Frances Burney's The Wanderer	p. 31
The Medium Makes the Man: Anne Plumptre's Something New and The History of Myself and My Friend	p. 45
ôToo much in the common Novel styleö: Reforming Masculinities in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility	p. 67
Constructing Masculine Narrative: Charlotte Brontë's The Professor	p. 83
The Lifted Veil: George Eliot's Experiment with First-Person Narrative	p. 101
Assimilating the ôpretty youngsterö: George Eliot's Eroticized Men on the Borderlines of Morality, Religion, Race, and Nation	p. 119
ôHis spirituality or his manlinessö: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's (Re)Constructions of Christian Masculinity	p. 137
The Differential Construction of Masculinity in the Writings of Virginia Woolf	p. 155
Knitting Paradise Lost: Masculinity and Domesticity in the Novels of Carol Shields	p. 171
Looking (Im)Properly: Women Objectifying Men's Bodies in Contemporary Australian Women's Fiction	p. 185
Unmaking the Self-Made Man: Louise Erdrich's Fictional Exploration of Masculinity	p. 207
ôI've tried my entire life to be a good manö: Suzanne Brockmann's Sam Starrett, Ideal Romance Hero	p. 227
Bibliography	p. 249
Index	p. 267
About the Contributors	p. 271
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