Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism

ISBN-13: 9781107004726 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 226 str.

Greg Forter

Opis

American modernist writers' engagement with changing ideas of gender and race often took the form of a struggle against increasingly inflexible categories. Greg Forter interprets modernism as an effort to mourn a form of white manhood that fused the 'masculine' with the 'feminine'. He argues that modernists were engaged in a poignant yet deeply conflicted effort to hold on to socially 'feminine' and racially marked aspects of identity, qualities that the new social order encouraged them to disparage. Examining works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Willa Cather, Forter shows how these writers shared an ambivalence toward the feminine and an unease over existing racial categories that made it difficult for them to work through the loss of the masculinity they mourned. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism offers a bold new reading of canonical modernism in the United States.

Recenzje

"The work’s strengths are the fascinating analysis of gender intersecting race and the keen scrutiny of narrative strategy. The first chapter reads The Great Gatsby as allegory of the loss of male creativity embodied in lyrical Gatsby, a style of manhood “that cannot but be lost” (15)."
-- Beth Widmaier Capo,American Studies, Vol. 52, no. 3

Spis treści

Introduction; 1. Gender, melancholy, and the whiteness of impersonal form in The Great Gatsby; 2. Redeeming violence in The Sun Also Rises: phallic embodiment, primitive ritual, fetishistic melancholia; 3. Versions of traumatic melancholia: the burden of white man's history in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!; 4. The Professor's House: primitivist melancholy and the gender of Utopian forms; Afterword; Index.