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?".

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?.""

Friendship in the classical world was celebrated as among the highest human achievements: nothing was more likely to lead to the divine than looking for it in the eyes of a friend. In exploring the complexities of male-male relations beyond the simple labels of sexuality, Queer Friendship shows how love between men has a rich and varied history in English literature. The friend could offer a reflection of one's own worth and a celebration of a kind of mutuality that was not connected to family or home. These same-sex friendships are memorable because they give shape to the novels of which they are a part, and question the assumption that the love between friends is different from the love between lovers. Queer Friendship explores English literary friendship in three ways: the elegiac, the erotic, and the platonic, by considering a myriad of works, including Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Tennyson's 'In Memoriam A. H. H.', and Dickens' Great Expectations.

Philip BrettOCOs groundbreaking writing on Benjamin Britten altered the course of music scholarship in the later twentieth century. This volume is the first to gather in one collection BrettOCOs searching and provocative work on the great British composer. Some of the early essays opened the door to gay studies in music, while the discussions that Brett initiated reinvigorated the study of BrittenOCOs work and inspired a generation of scholars to imagine the new musicology. Addressing urgent questions of how an artistOCOs sexual, cultural, and personal identity feeds into specific musical texts, Brett examines most of BrittenOCOs operas as well as his role in the British cultural establishment of the mid-twentieth century. With some of the essays appearing here for the first time, this volume develops a complex understanding of BrittenOCOs musical achievement and highlights the many ways that Brett expanded the borders of his field."

In looking closely at Horace Walpole's Correspondence, George E. Haggerty shows how these letters, when taken in aggregate, offer an astonishingly vivid account of the vagaries of eighteenth-century masculinity. Walpole talks about himself obsessively: his wants, his needs, his desires; his physical and mental pain; his artistic appreciation and his critical responses. It is impossible to read these letters and not come away with a vivid impression of a complex personality from another age. Haggerty examines the ways in which Walpole presents himself as an eighteenth-century gentleman, and considers his personal relationships, his needs and aspirations, his emotionalism and his rationality—in short, his construction of himself—in order to see what it tells us about the age in general and more specifically, about masculinity in an era of social flux. This study of Walpole and his epistolary relations offers a unique window into both the history of masculinity in the eighteenth century and the codification of friendship as the preeminent value in western culture. Recent studies have tried to rewrite Walpole in a twenty-first century mold while this work looks at the writer and the ways in which he constructs himself and his relations, not in hopes of uncovering a lurid secret, but rather in pursuit of the figure that he created and that has fascinated generations of readers and writers since the eighteenth century.

This work offers a new perspective on Gothic fiction and reassesses its place in literary history. After defining his concept of "affective form" and summarizing the problematic assumptions behind recent critical approaches to the Gothic, George Haggerty introduces a startling theoretical discussion of the Gothic Tale, and he explains in what ways the tale, as a form with identifiable affective properties, is ideally suited to Gothic concerns. Having established a direct relation between this study and recent discussions of narratology and generic identity, Haggerty develops his argument as it applies to major Gothic works in both England and America, including works by Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, Shelley, Bronte, Poe, Hawthorne, and James. He examines the Gothic Tale as a form that resolves the inconsistency and incoherence of many Gothic novels and offers even the best of them a center of focus and a way of achieving their fullest affective power.

In this study, the Gothic Tale emerges as a means of heightening the emotional intelligibility of Gothic fiction and answering Walpole's confused desire to unite "two kinds of romance" in the Gothic. It is a form that can answer the ontological and epistemological, as well as the structural, challenge of the Gothic writers. From its first hints within the Gothic novel as an alternative literary mode offering the Gothicists various expressive advantages to its eerie success in a work such as James's "The Jolly Corner," the Gothic Tale offers insight into generic distinction and literary expression. This is a major statement about an important literary form.