Homo Americanus

by Bak, John S.

• ISBN13: 9780838642542
• ISBN10: 0838642543
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-31
• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Pr

Summary

Though separated by only eleven years of age, Hemingway and Williams seem literary generations apart. Both authors bridged their modernist/postmodernist divide through mutual examinations of the polemics behind heteromasculinity, Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises and Williams in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This book explores the two works' many sociopolitical, literary, and intertextual ties, in particular how the conclusion of one echoes that of the other, not just in its irony but also in its implication of the audience's participation in engendering the social rules responsible for the protagonist's struggle to negotiate his sexual identity.

Author Biography

John S. Bak is Professor of American Literature at Nancy-Universite in France where he teaches courses in translation, literary journalism, American drama, and the American gothic.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. 9
Acknowledgments	p. 11
Introduction	p. 17
Williams's Cat and Hemingway's Sun: Queenly Masculine	p. 32
The Sun Also Sets: Jake Barnes, Impotence, and Sexual Existenialism	p. 53
"A Dying Gaul": The Signifying Phallus and Williams's "Three Players of a Summer Game"	p. 101
"Sneakin' an' Spyin'" from Broadway to the Beltway: Cold War Masculinity, Brick, and Homosexual Existentialism	p. 130
The Impotence of Being Ernest: Scott and Hemingway's "Gender Trouble" in Williams's Clothes for a Summer Hotel	p. 160
Conclusion	p. 208
Notes	p. 224
Bibliography	p. 280
Index	p. 294
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