White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature

ISBN-13: 9783319904597 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 243 str.

Tim Engles

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Table of Contents

 

1          Introduction: Making America White Male Again

                        Common White Male Dispositions

                        Forms of White Male Nostalgia

2          Ethnicized White Male Nostalgia: Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

                        White Anglo-Saxonism

                        Resurgent White Anglo-Saxonism

                        Empathetic Black Embodiment and White Male Emotional Constipation

                        The Ethnicist Presence

                        Pseudo-feudal Nostalgia

3          Moralizing White Male Nostalgia: Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday

                        White Male Histories

                        Purified White Male Bodies

                        The White Male Death Drive

4          Spatialized White Male Nostalgia: Carol Shields’s Happenstance

                        Contexts for Happenstance

An Unwittingly White Male Historian

                        Communally Cognizant Reflective Nostalgia

                        Dehistoricized Land

                        Geographical Space and White Male Mobility                      

5          Denying White Male Nostalgia: Don DeLillo’s Underworld

                        The Relational Underpinnings of Cold War White Masculinity

                        Reflective Nostalgia and Communal Art

                        White-male Pattern Deafness

                        Masculinized Isolation and Feminized Community

6          Possessive White Male Nostalgia: Louis Begley’s About Schmidt

                        Entitled White Masculinity

                        Sovereign WASP Masculinity

                        Nostalgic White World-traveling

                        The White Manchild

                        Repressed White Male Shame

7          Epilogue: Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last and the Futures of Domineering

White Masculinity

O autorze

Tim Engles is Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, USA, specializing in multicultural literature and critical whiteness studies. He has co-edited Critical Essays on Don DeLillo (2000) and Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White Noise (2006) and his recent publications address the work of Gloria Naylor, Tim O’Brien and Walter Dean Myers, as well as systemic racism in the criminal justice system and racialized social media slacktivism.

Blurb

White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature charts the late twentieth-century development of reactionary emotions commonly felt by resentful, yet often goodhearted white men. Examining an eclectic array of literary case studies in light of recent work in critical whiteness and masculinity studies, history, geography, philosophy and theology, Tim Engles delineates five preliminary forms of white male nostalgia—as dramatized in novels by Sloan Wilson, Richard Wright, Carol Shields, Don DeLillo, Louis Begley and Margaret Atwood—demonstrating how literary fiction can help us understand the inner workings of deluded dominance. These authors write from identities outside the defensive domain of normalized white masculinity, demonstrating via extended interior dramas that although nostalgia is primarily thought of as an emotion felt by individuals, it also works to shore up entrenched collective power.