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This book explores how women writers create and question men and masculinity. It will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of Literature, Gender Studies, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies.
List of contents
1. Introduction 2. "[T]hat Where One was, There was the Other": Dreams of Queer Stories in Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun, or, The Fair Vow-Breaker (1689) 3. "A Fit Companion for a Woman of Sense": Jane West’s Re-Education of Masculine Norms in Letters Addressed to a Young Man (1802) and The Infidel Father (1802) 4. Edgeworth, Owenson, and the Masculine Border 5. Reading the Absence: The Shaping of Male Characters and their Crises in the Void 6. A Woman’s Thoughts about Men: Malthus and Middle-Class Masculinity in Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman 7. George Eliot Writing the Drunken Husband: "Janet’s Repentance" as a study of Male Violence and Co-Dependence 8. Sketching the New Man Out: Ellen Wood’s Exploration of Victorian Masculinity 9. Women Writing Creole Masculinity
About the author
Joanne Ella Parsons is Lecturer at Falmouth University, UK, and Advanced Studies in England (a branch college of Franklin and Marshall, USA).
Ruth Heholt is Senior Lecturer of Dark Economies and Gothic Literature at Falmouth University, UK.
Summary
This book explores how women writers create and question men and masculinity. As men have written women so have women written men. Debate about how men have represented women in literature has a long and distinguished history; however, there has been much less examination of the ways in which women writers depict male characters. This is clearly a notable absence given the recent rise in interest in the field of 18th- and 19th-century masculinities. Women writers were in a unique position to be able to deconstruct and examine cultural norms from a position away from the centre. This enabled women to ‘look aslant’ at masculinity using their female gaze to expose the ruptures and cracks inherent within the rigid formation of the manly ideal. This collection focuses on women’s representations of men and masculinity as they negotiate issues of class, gender, race, and sexuality.
Women Writing Men: 1689 to 1869 will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of Literature, Gender Studies, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.
