From Chivalry To Terrorism - War And The Changing Nature Of Masculinity

Zusatztext “History in the grand manner! pulled off with brilliance! wonderful imagination and considerable erudition. . . . Fascinating.” — The Washington Post Book World “History at its most powerful. It is impossible to do justice to the range of fascinating material in this book.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review “The reader is left marveling. . . . An expansive! ambitious project.” –San Francisco Chronicle “A terrific topic . . . The book displays Braudy’s loving immersion in his subject! fine grasp of historical complexity! and aversion for glib or dogmatic judgments.” –The New York Times Book Review “A vivid! hugely ambitious book . . . Likely to be widely read.” – The New York Review of Books Informationen zum Autor Leo Braudy Klappentext Manliness has always been linked to physical prowess and to war; indeed the warrior has been the archetypal man across countless cultures throughout time. In this magisterial excursion through literature, history, warfare, and sociology, one of our most prominent scholars tracks the complex relationship between the changing methods and goals of warfare and shifting models of manhood. This journey takes us from the citizen soldiers of ancient Greece to the medieval knights to the misogynistic terrorists of Al Qaeda. As he chronicles these transformations, Leo Braudy weighs the significance of everything from weapon technology to the hairstyles favored during different eras. He offers fresh insights on codes of war and codes of racial purity, and on cultural and historical figures from Socrates to Don Quixote to Napoleon to Custer to Rambo. Epic in scope and free of academic jargon, From Chivalry to Terrorism is a masterwork of scholarship that is both accessible and breathtakingly ambitious. Leseprobe 1 REMEMBER MY NAME Like the elephant sought by the six blind men, or the electron that changes position depending on when it is observed, masculinity must be mapped rather than merely discovered. Not only is it elusive, but there are also those with vested interests in keeping it mono-lithic and mysterious. Is masculinity, for example, entirely identifiable with patriarchy? That is, does masculinity in any age refer primarily to the power over groups considered to be weaker and more marginal to society-groups usually composed of women but also of men considered to be at best incomplete or imperfect, and at worst barely human? Certainly there have been many men, both in and out of public power, who believed and still believe this. But how was their own masculinity learned? Did it come directly from the experience of having the particular kind of male body their culture approved? Or are there a whole variety of preliminary and partial models, each with its own divergence from the grand norm and each with its contradiction of it? One clue might be in the language of masculinity. Where do the words designating the male come from? What do they mean? In the West at least, this language has been heavily influenced by both the language of wartime masculinity (or fashioned in contrast to the language used to describe, say, the saint or the sage) and the language of social class. Man existed long before "masculine," a word that first appears in English in the Middle Ages as a French import used to designate not specific masculine characteristics so much as the general difference between male and female, whether in plants, animals, or human beings. Then, with the Norman conquest and the adoption of Norman-French as the standard for all educated discourse, "masculine" became a more frequent usage.* "Man," as the older term, has a more tangled history. It goes back to an Indo-European root meaning "earth" that descends equally into "human" and "humus." There are two Latin words for man: vir and homo. Homo, related to the...

Product details

• Authors: Leo Braudy
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.04.2005
• EAN: 9780679768302
• ISBN: 978-0-679-76830-2
• No. of pages: 656
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 205 mm x 37 mm
• Subjects: Education and learning > Teaching preparation > Vocational needs; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories