Post-World War II Masculinities in British and American Literature and Culture: Towards Comparative Masculinity Studies

ISBN-13: 9781409465980 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 192 str.

Stefan Horlacher;Kevin Floyd

Opis

Analyzing literary texts, plays, films and photographs within a transatlantic framework, this volume explores the inseparable and mutually influential relationship between different forms of national identity in Great Britain and the United States and the construction of masculinity in each country. The contributors take up issues related to how certain kinds of nationally specific masculine identifications are produced, how these change over time, and how literature and other forms of cultural representation eventually question and deconstruct their own myths of masculinity. Focusing on the period from the end of World War II to the 1980s, the essays each take up a topic with particular cultural and historical resonance, whether it is hypermasculinity in early cold war films; the articulation of male anxieties in plays by Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Sam Shepard; the evolution of photographic depictions of masculinity from the 1960s to the 1980s; or the representations of masculinity in the fiction of American and British writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Richard Yates, John Braine, Martin Amis, Evan S. Connell, James Dickey, John Berger, Philip Roth, Frank Chin, and Maxine Hong Kingston. The editors and contributors make a case for the importance of understanding the larger context for the emergence of more pluralistic, culturally differentiated and ultimately transnational masculinities, arguing that it is possible to conceptualize and emphasize difference and commonality simultaneously.

Recenzje

' ... nuanced, engaging, and perceptive readings of various novels, plays, and films ...' Anglistik

Spis treści

Chapter 1 Towards Comparative Masculinity Studies: On the Interdependence of National Identity and the Construction of Masculinity, Stefan Horlacher; Chapter 2 The Early Cold Warrior on Screen: An All-Purpose Signifier?, Kathleen Starck; Chapter 3 The Flexible Mr. Ripley: Noir Historicism and Post-War Transnational Masculinity in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Elizabeth A. Hatmaker, Christopher Breu; Chapter 4 “And I Mean Is It Any Wonder All the Men End up Emasculated?” Post-War Masculinities in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and John Braine’s Room at the Top, Claudia Falk; Chapter 5 The Colors of Masculinity: Gender and the Camera from Sixties Street Photographers to Paul Graham and Martin Parr, Christoph Ribbat; Chapter 6 Accounting for a Crisis—A Transatlantic Analysis of Male First-Person Narratives: Martin Amis’s Money versus Evan S. Connell’s The Diary of a Rapist, Erik Pietschmann; Chapter 7 Anxious Men: Male Friendships and Domesticity in James Dickey’s Deliverance, Lisa Felstead; Chapter 8 ’Cubism’ as Intersectionalism: John Berger’s Figures of Masculinity, Dirk Wiemann; Chapter 9 “It’s One Hell of a Mess in Here”: Masculinity, the Myth of the Frontier, and the Renunciation of the Mother in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, David Mamet’s American Buffalo, and Sam Shepard’s True West, Christa Grewe-Volpp; Chapter 10 Constructions of Masculinity in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman, and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Angelika Köhler; Chapter 11 Gendered and Racialized: Reclaiming Chinese American Masculinities since the 1970s, Mirjam M. Frotscher;

O autorze

Stefan Horlacher is Chair of English Literature at the Dresden University of Technology, Germany, and Kevin Floyd is Associate Professor of English at Kent State University, USA.