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: 9780739133668
• ISBN10: 0739133667
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-04-15
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

Female novelists have always invested as much narrative energy in constructing their male characters_heroes and villains_as 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 their male counterparts. Using a variety of theoretical models and coming to an equal variety of conclusions, the essays collected in Women Constructing Men skilfully demonstrate that the topic of female-authored masculinities not only allows scholars to re-read and re-discover almost every novel ever written by a woman writer, but also triggers reflections on a host of theoretical questions of gender and genre. In re-examining these male characters across literary history, these articles extend the feminist question of 'Who has the authority to create a female character?' to 'Who has the authority to create any character?'.

Author Biography

Sarah S. G. Frantz is assistnt professor of English at Fayetteville State University. Katharina Rennhak is professor of English at the Bergische Universitat 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
"Too much in the common Novel Style": 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 "pretty youngster": George Eliot's Eroticized Men on the Borderlines of Morality, Religion, Race, and Nation	p. 119
"His spirituality or his manliness": 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
"I've tried my entire life to be a good man": Suzanne Brockmann's Sam Starrett Ideal Romance Hero	p. 227
Bibliography	p. 249
Index	p. 267
About the Contributors	p. 271
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.