Men Beyond Desire

This book explores the construction of male sexuality in nineteenth-century American literature and comes up with some startling findings. Far from desiring heterosexual sex and wishing to bond with other men through fraternity, the male protagonists of classic American literature mainly want to be left alone. Greven makes the claim that American men, eschewing both marriage and male friendship, strive to remain emotionally and sexually inviolate. Examining the work of traditional authors - Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Cooper, Irving, Stowe - Greven discovers highly untraditional and transgressive representations of desire and sexuality. Objects of desire from both women and other men, the inviolate males discussed in this study overturn established gendered and sexual categories, just as this study overturns archetypal assumptions about American manhood and American literature.

This book explores the construction of male sexuality in nineteenth-century American literature and comes up with some startling findings. Far from desiring heterosexual sex and wishing to bond with other men through fraternity, the male protagonists of classic American literature mainly want to be left alone. Greven makes the claim that American men, eschewing both marriage and male friendship, strive to remain emotionally and sexually inviolate. Examining the work of traditional authors - Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Cooper, Irving, Stowe - Greven discovers highly untraditional and transgressive representations of desire and sexuality. Objects of desire from both women and other men, the inviolate males discussed in this study overturn established gendered and sexual categories, just as this study overturns archetypal assumptions about American manhood and American literature.

The past few decades have seen remarkable technological growth in the delivery of modern medicine. Pharmaceutical, diagnostic, and surgical interventions have transformed the way in which health is perceived and medicine is practiced. The modern patient has become so dependent upon these therapies and interventions that they take a passive interest in their health. For author Dr. Mark W. Hatcher, this is a symptom of a culture in crisisdoctors treat disease instead of fostering health. Using real-life examples from a busy emergency room, he investigates this health-care crisis and reevaluates what it means to be healthy. In Beyond Desire: Rediscovering Health and Wellness, Hatcher examines the assumptions upon which the modern medical world is founded, explores the healing methods that have been practiced for centuries by healers around the world, and proposes a strategy for health that focuses on the importance of the mind and spirit in achieving and maintaining health. Beyond Desire shows how the practices of meditation, yoga, tai chi, acupuncture, proper eating, and selfless service are the true pathways to healing and rediscovering health and wellness.

Amanda Ross is thrilled when she is appointed junior high school principal in Caution Point, N.C. But her promotion will only be a pipe dream if the board of education discovers that she's pregnant—and single. She never expected her baby's father to desert her, but explanations won't satisfy a small town's rumor mill. A husband is what she needs, and handsome music engineer Marcus Hickson looks like the answer to her problem. Embittered by his ex-wife's selfish and cruel behavior, Marcus told himself he'd never marry again. That is, until doctors inform him that his injured daughter needs immediate surgery, and Amanda—financially independent because of her inheritance—offers to pay the medical bills if he'll be her husband. Desperate, Marcus agrees, as long as their "arrangement" is strictly business. But days and nights under the same roof soon ignite mutual desire. Now Marcus and Amanda's marriage of convenience has become an affair of the heart…and a deception that endangers everything they hold dear.

A struggle between narcissistic and masochistic modes of manhood defined Hollywood masculinity in the period between the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. David Greven's contention is that a profound shift in representation occurred during the early 1990s when Hollywood was transformed by an explosion of films that foregrounded non-normative gendered identity and sexualities. In the years that have followed, popular cinema has either emulated or evaded the representational strategies of this era, especially in terms of gender and sexuality. One major focus of this study is that, in a great deal of the criticism in both the fields of film theory and queer theory, masochism has been positively cast as a form of male sexuality that resists the structures of normative power, while narcissism has been negatively cast as either a regressive sexuality or the bastion of white male privilege. Greven argues that narcissism is a potentially radical mode of male sexuality that can defy normative codes and categories of gender, whereas masochism, far from being radical, has emerged as the default mode of a traditional normative masculinity. This study combines approaches from a variety of disciplines—psychoanalysis, queer theory, American studies, men's studies, and film theory—as it offers fresh readings of several important films of the past twenty years, including Casualties of War, The Silence of the Lambs, Fight Club, The Passion of the Christ, Auto Focus, and Brokeback Mountain.

Polly Young-Eisendrath´s Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to Be Wanted was first published by Harmony Books in 1999. Since then, it has become a classic read for those readers– to use a cinematographic expression – who want to use analytical psychology to shed light on what women want. This book, when first published, was described (and still is) as “provocative and vital.” More than 20 years after its publication, this book still shows effectively “how to break out of this double bind so that” women “can encounter the challenges of choice and responsibility for our own desires.” The author “wisely uses mythological and personal stories to help us take control of our sexual, relational, material, and spiritual lives.” Therefore, “If you feel confused, resentful, or trapped in a life that does not seem to be fully yours, then you can find a clear path to your true self, once and for all, with the help of Women and Desire.” This book is the second of the series titled Jungianeum: Re-Covered Classics in Analytical Psychology curated by Stefano Carpani.

Expanding our understanding of the possibilities and challenges inherent in the expression of same-sex desire before the Civil War, David Greven identifies a pattern of what he calls ’gender protest’ and sexual possibility recurring in antebellum works. He suggests that major authors such as Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne consciously sought to represent same-sex desire in their writings. Focusing especially on conceptions of the melancholia of gender identification and shame, Greven argues that same-sex desire was inextricably enmeshed in scenes of gender-role strain, as exemplified in the extent to which The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym depicts masculine identity adrift and in disarray. Greven finds similarly compelling representations of gender protest in Fuller’s exploration of the crisis of gendered identity in Summer on the Lakes, in Melville’s representation of Redburn’s experience of gender nonconformity, and in Hawthorne’s complicated delineation of desire in The Scarlet Letter. As Greven shows, antebellum authors not only took up the taboo subjects of same-sex desire and female sexuality, but were adept in their use of a variety of rhetorical means for expressing the inexpressible.

Excerpt from Beyond Desire Neil bradley wrote letters to his friend Red Oliver. Neil said he was going to marry a woman in Kansas City. She was a revolutionist and Neil did not know when he first met her whether he was quite one or not. He said: It's like this, Red. You remember the empty feeling we had when we were in school together. I don't think you had it much when you were out here, but I did. I had it all the time I was in college and after I came home. I can't talk to Father and Mother about it much. They wouldn't under stand. It would hurt them. I guess, Neil said, that all of us younger men and women with any life in us have it now. Neil spoke in his letter of God. That was a bit strange, Red thought, coming from Neil. He must have got that from his woman. We can't hear His voice or feel Him in the land, he said. He thought perhaps the earlier men and women in America had something he and Red had missed. They had God, whatever that had meant to them. The early New Englanders, who had been so intellectually domi nant and who had influenced so much the thought of the whole country must have thought they had God really. If they had, what they had, it had come down to Neil and Red in some way pretty much weakened and washed out. Neil thought that. Religion, he said, was now an old gown, grown thin and with all the colors washed out of it. People still wore the old gown but it did not warm them any more. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.