Masculinities And Literary Studies

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I Rethinking Ethnic Masculinities -- 1 The Negro Goes to War -- 2 Revisiting Masculinities from Whiteness Studies: Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"--3 Staging Intersectionality: Beyond Gender and Race in the American Theater -- Part II Transnational Masculinities -- 4 Men Around the World: Global and Transnational Masculinities -- 5 Transnational Legacies and Masculinity Politics in The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao -- 6 New Arab Masculinities: A Feminist Approach to Arab American Men in Post-9/11 Literature Written by Women -- Part III The Ages of Men -- 7 "Men Who Cry in Their Sleep": Aging Male Hysteria in Martin Amis's London Stories -- 8 Negotiating Childhood and Boyhood Boundaries: Richard Linklater's Boyhood and Toni Morrison's Black Boys -- 9 Fighting the Monsters Inside: Masculinity, Agency, and the Aging Gay Man in Christopher Bram's Father of Frankenstein -- Part IV Masculinities and Affect -- 10 Theorizing the Masculinity of Affect -- 11 Men of War: Affect, Embodiment, and Western Heroic Masculinity in Dispatches and The Hurt Locker -- Part V Eco-masculinities -- 12 The "Wild, Wild World": Masculinity and the Environment in the American Literary Imagination -- 13 Green Intersections: Caring Masculinities and the Environmental Crisis -- Part VI Masculinities and/in Capitalism -- 14 Masculinities and Financial Capitalism -- 15 Capitalism, Slavery, and Mask-ulinities: New Directions -- 16 "To Love What Death Doesn't Touch": Questioning Capitalist Masculinity in Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch -- Part VII Epilogue Masculinity Studies: New Directions -- Index

Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice combines a critical survey of the most important concepts in Masculinity Studies with a historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed within British Literature and a special focus on developments in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Conventional ideas about gender and sexuality dictate that people born with male bodies naturally possess both a man's identity and a man's right to authority. Recent scholarship in the field of gender studies, however, exposes the complex political technologies that construct gender as a supposedly unchanging biological essence with self-evident links to physicality, identity, and power. In Masculinities without Men? Jean Bobby Noble explores how the construction of gender was thrown into crisis during the twentieth century, resulting in a permanent rupture in the sex/gender system, and how masculinity became an unstable category, altered across time, region, social class, and ethnicity.

This book focuses on the construction of hegemonic masculinity as well as its representations in literature, culture, and film. Although white heterosexual masculinity continues to be the dominant model, it remains, paradoxically, largely invisible in gender terms. While the first three chapters thus offer introductory theoretical perspectives on the latest research on white masculinities, the following chapters concentrate on applying masculinity theory to the analysis of both social constructions and cultural (i.e. literary and film) representations of men’s emotions (with a special focus on new fatherhood models), friendships between men, as well as gender-based violence.

In a climate of anxiety about boys and reading, this book addresses the gendering of English Studies, drawing on recent research on masculinity. In drawing together the study of text and narrative with insight into the experience of the classroom, this book will be of value to both teachers and students of English Studies.

Interspersed in each chapter are a series of questions and tasks aimed at encouraging the reader to engage her/himself in the study of masculinities in everyday life and popular culture.

Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

An in-depth analysis into the construction of male identity as well as a unique and comprehensive historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed in British literature from the Middle Ages to the present. This book is an important contribution to the emerging field of masculinity studies.