This book illuminates Jane Austen's exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists. This book reveals that Austen pioneers and celebrates a new vision of masculinity that could complement the Romantic desire for agency, individualism and selfhood embodied in her heroines. Rewriting desirable masculinity as an internalised, psychologically complex and authentic gender identity - a model of manhood that drives the ongoing appeal and cultural power of her men in the twenty-first century - Austen explores both the challenges and the opportunities for male selfhood, romantic love and feminine agency. Jane Austen's Men is among the first full-length works to explore Austen's male protagonists as textual constructions of masculinity. Sarah Ailwood reveals the depth of Austen's engagement with her predecessors and contemporaries, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West and Jane Porter, on critical questions of masculinity and its relationship to femininity and narrative form. This book illuminates in new ways Jane Austen's ambitions for the novel, and the political power of the courtship romance genre in the Romantic era.

This book illuminates Jane Austen's exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists. This book reveals that Austen pioneers and celebrates a new vision of masculinity that could complement the Romantic desire for agency, individualism and selfhood embodied in her heroines. Rewriting desirable masculinity as an internalised, psychologically complex and authentic gender identity - a model of manhood that drives the ongoing appeal and cultural power of her men in the twenty-first century - Austen explores both the challenges and the opportunities for male selfhood, romantic love and feminine agency. Jane Austen's Men is among the first full-length works to explore Austen's male protagonists as textual constructions of masculinity. Sarah Ailwood reveals the depth of Austen's engagement with her predecessors and contemporaries, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West and Jane Porter, on critical questions of masculinity and its relationship to femininity and narrative form. This book illuminates in new ways Jane Austen's ambitions for the novel, and the political power of the courtship romance genre in the Romantic era.

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?.""

Provides new reflections on literary influence using Katherine Mansfield as a case study. It is commonplace to talk about writers in terms of their similarities with and differences from other writers but how does literary influence actually work? This book seeks to understand this mysterious but powerful impetus for artistic production through an examination of Katherine Mansfield's wide net of literary associations. Mansfield's case proves that influence is careless of chronologies, spatial limits, artistic movements and cultural differences and has many 'shades' or 'tones'. Expanding upon theories of influence that focus on anxiety and coteries, this book shows that it is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can be evidenced by such things as satire, plagiarism, yearning and resentment. This book seeks to map the ecologies of Mansfield's influence beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that they roam wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries. Extends upon models of literary influence that are oriented around the ideas of anxiety and coteries; engages with and develops areas of scholarly inquiry investigating modernism as the product of social and intellectual networks; Offers new interpretations of Mansfield's relationships with writers with whom she is often associated, such as D H Lawrence, Anton Chekhov and Virginia Woolf and traces new connections between Mansfield's work and the work of writers not previously linked to Mansfield, such as Evelyn Waugh, Colette and Nettie Palmer.