Men And Manliness On The Frontier

In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, there existed a dominant discourse on what it meant to be a man –denoted by the term 'manliness'. Based on the sociological work of R.W. Connell and others who argue that gender is performative, Robert Hogg asks how British men performed manliness on the colonial frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia.

In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, there existed a dominant discourse on what it meant to be a man –denoted by the term 'manliness'. Based on the sociological work of R.W. Connell and others who argue that gender is performative, Robert Hogg asks how British men performed manliness on the colonial frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia.

Being an Irish man was a consistent, contentious issue in the Canadas. The aim of this book is to provide the firstgendered examination of male Irish migration to Upper and Lower Canada withinthe broader contexts of negative stereotypes about Irish violence and Irishmen'squestionable loyalty to the British Empire. Through examinations of key violent episodes and (in)famous individuals,Violent Loyalties argues that beingan Irishman in the Canadas meant daily negotiations with discrimination, ethnicrivalries, the pressure to become more 'British', and having to base one'ssense of manliness on being the most visible 'other' in the colonies. Irish Catholics faced the burden of beingdual minorities - the 'other' religion within the Anglophone world andEnglish-speaking in the Catholic sphere already established byFrench-Canadians. Irish Protestants alsohad difficulties adapting to their new communities, as the problematicassociation with violent Orangeism and rivalries with Scottish and Englishimmigrants, many of whom were United Empire Loyalists, created obstacles in thequest for upward social mobility. BothCanadian and Irish historiographies are sorely lacking in examinations ofmasculinity compared with those investigating American, French, Australian, orBritish manliness. This gap in theliterature becomes even more apparent outside of a twentieth-centuryfocus. Violent Loyalties aims to fill these lacunae in thehistories of colonial Canada and the Irish diaspora.

"The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. And yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of the Victorian era: the same people popularly remembered as strait-laced, repressed, and order-loving. How do we make sense of this difference? Examining the closely linked gold rushes in California and British Columbia, historian Christopher Herbert shows that gold rushers worried about the meaning of white manhood in the near-anarchic, ethnically mixed societies that grew up around the mines. Their anxieties about reproducing the white male dominance they were accustomed to played a central role in the construction of colonial regimes. As white gold rushers flocked to the mines, they encountered a wide range of people they considered inferior and potentially dangerous to white dominance, including Indigenous people, Latin Americans, Australians, and Chinese. The way that white miners interacted with these groups reflected the distinct political principles and strategies of the US and British colonial governments, as well as the ideas about race and respectability the newcomers brought with them. In addition to renovating traditional understandings of the Pacific Slope gold rushes, Herbert argues that historians' understanding of white manliness has been too fixated on the Eastern United States and Britain. In the nineteenth century, popular attention largely focused on the West, and it was in the gold fields and the cities they spawned that new ideas of white manliness emerged, prefiguring transformations elsewhere."--Provided by publisher.

Set in the late nineteenth-century Canadian and American West, Guy Vanderhaeghe's bestselling and multi-award-winning epic Frontier Trilogy is now available together for the first time. The Englishman's Boy brilliantly links together Hollywood in the 1920s with one of the bloodiest, most brutal events of the nineteenth-century Canadian West--the Cypress Hills Massacre--to tell an unforgettable novel about power, greed, and the pull of dreams that has at its centre the haunting story of a young drifter--"the Englishman's boy"--whose fate, ultimately, is a tragic one. Winner of Canada Reads 2004, The Last Crossing tells the epic story of an unlikely group--including two Englishmen in search of their lost brother; their half-Blackfoot, half-Scottish guide; a Civil War veteran searching for salvation; a young woman determined to avenge her sister's brutal murder--who make the treacherous journey across the unknown landscape of the West, only to become entangled in an unfolding drama that forces each person to come to terms with his own demons. Set in the aftermath of Custer's defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn, A Good Man weaves together the lives of a compellingly drawn cast of characters, including Wesley Case, a disgraced military officer who works as a liaison between the American and Canadian militaries in an effort to contain the Native Americans' unresolved anger in the wake of the Civil War; Ada Tarr, the beautiful, outspoken widow he has fallen in love with; and Michael Dunne, her disturbed admirer. When the American government unleashes its final assault on the Indians, Dunne commences his own vicious plan for vengeance in one last feverish attempt to claim Ada as his own.

We are just beginning to understand masculinity as a fiction or a localizable, historical, and therefore unstable construct. This book points the way to a much-needed interrogation of the many modes of masculinity, as represented in literature. Both women and men who are engaged in critical thinking about genders and sexualities will find these essays always thoughtful and often provocative. —Thas E. Morgan, Associate Professor of English, Arizona State University Peter Murphy has assembled an innovative, challenging, and important set of contributions to a growing field of inquiry into constructions of masculinities in literature, inspired principally by feminist and gay studies. Illuminatingly crossing lines of genders, sexualities, cultures, and methodologies, Fictions of Masculinity greatly advances our understanding of representations of men, masculinities, misandry, and misogyny in a wide range of literary works and genres, and helps us to imagine (and thereby ultimately bring about) alternative constructions. —Harry Brod, Editor, The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies, A Mensch Among Men: Explorations in Jewish Masculinity, and Theorizing Masculinities. Women writing about women dominates contemporary work on sexuality. Men have been far more willing to discuss female sexuality than male sexuality, while the most radical and insightful analyses of male sexuality have come from women. When men consider the issue of female sexuality they often speak from assumptions of security about their own unexamined sexuality. This book maintains that men have to interrogate their own sexuality if there is to be a revision of phallocentric discourse; and, that this revision of masculinity must be done in dialogue with women. The essays included in this collection examine the deep structure of masculine codes. They ask the question Who are the men in modern literature? Examining the force of the dominant values of Western masculinity, they synthesize insights from feminism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and new historicism. These perspectives help explain how male sexuality has been structured by fictional representations. By examining the images of masculinity in modern literature, the essays explore traditional and non-traditional roles of men in society and in personal relationships. They look at how men are represented in literature, the fiction of manhood. They attempt to unravel the assumptions behind these representations by looking at the implications of this imagination. And they speculate on possibilities for creating a new imaginary of masculinity by identifying what literature has to say about that change. With analyses of a range of genres (novels, poetry, plays and autobiography), Western and Third World literatures, and theoretical perspectives, Fictions of Masculinity provides a significant contribution to this rapidly growing field of study. Contributors are: David Bergman (Towson State University), Miriam Cooke (Duke University), Martin Danahy (Emory University), Richard Dellamora (Trent University, Ontario), Leonard Duroche (University of Minnesota), Jim Elledge (Illinois State University), Alfred Habegger (University of Kansas), Suzanne Kehde (California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo), David Leverenz (University of Florida), Christopher Metress (Wake Forest University), Peter F. Murphy (SUNY, Empire State College), Rafael Prez-Torres (University of Pennsylvania), David Radavich (Eastern Illinois University), and Peter Schwenger (St. Vincent University, Nova Scotia).