"While feminist critics have re-invented the canon, studies of male
authors have remained oddly ungendered. The authors in Peter
Murphy's enlightening collection hold male authors up to a gender
lens' to explore how in their lives and in their texts, these
writers were working out issues of masculinity and sexuality. The
refreshing results cross all boundaries cultural, sexual, even
disciplinary."
--Michael S. Kimmel, SUNY, Stony Brook, Editor, "Men's Lives" and
"Men Confront Pornography"
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 thisrapidly 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).
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