Masculine Style The American West and Literary Modernism

by Worden, Daniel

• ISBN13: 9780230120310
• ISBN10: 0230120318
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-09-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

In Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism, Daniel Worden argues for the importance of "cowboy masculinity," as dramatized in late nineteenth-century dime novels, to the writings of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Nat Love, Theodore Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, and Owen Wister . Masculine Stylepresents a groundbreaking account of masculine self-fashioning in American literature and positions the American West as central to modernism.

Author Biography

Daniel Worden is an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. His work on American literature and culture has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Canadian Review of American Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Southern Literary Journal, as well as the anthologies The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking and Violence, the Arts, and Willa Cather.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Masculinity, Modernism, and the West * Masculinity for the Million: Gender in Dime Novel Westerns * Between Anarchy and Hierarchy: Nat Love and Theodore Roosevelt’s Manly Feelings * Marrying Men: Intimacy in Owen Wister’s The Virginian * “I Like to be Like a Man”: Female Masculinity in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Ántonia * A Discipline of Sentiments: Ernest Hemingway’s Modernist Masculinity * Specters of Masculinity: Collectivity in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath * “There Never Was a Man Like Shane”