Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature

Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature PDF Author: Andrew Dowling
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351920146
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
The purpose of this book is to address two principal questions: 'Was the concept of masculinity a topic of debate for the Victorians?' and 'Why is Victorian literature full of images of male deviance when Victorian masculinity is defined by discipline?' In his introduction, Dowling defines Victorian masculinity in terms of discipline. He then addresses the central question of why an official ideal of manly discipline in the nineteenth century co-existed with a literature that is full of images of male deviance. In answering this question, he develops a notion of 'hegemonic deviance', whereby a dominant ideal of masculinity defines itself by what it is not. Dowling goes on to examine the fear of effeminacy facing Victorian literary men and the strategies used to combat these fears by the nineteenth-century male novelist. In later chapters, concentrating on Dickens and Thackeray, he examines how the male novelist is defined against multiple images of unmanliness. These chapters illustrate the investment made by men in constructing male 'others', those sources of difference that are constantly produced and then crushed from within gender divide. By analysing how Victorian literary texts both reveal and reconcile historical anxieties about the meaning of manliness, Dowling argues that masculinity is a complex construction rather than a natural given.

Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature

Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature PDF Author: Andrew Dowling
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351920146
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
The purpose of this book is to address two principal questions: 'Was the concept of masculinity a topic of debate for the Victorians?' and 'Why is Victorian literature full of images of male deviance when Victorian masculinity is defined by discipline?' In his introduction, Dowling defines Victorian masculinity in terms of discipline. He then addresses the central question of why an official ideal of manly discipline in the nineteenth century co-existed with a literature that is full of images of male deviance. In answering this question, he develops a notion of 'hegemonic deviance', whereby a dominant ideal of masculinity defines itself by what it is not. Dowling goes on to examine the fear of effeminacy facing Victorian literary men and the strategies used to combat these fears by the nineteenth-century male novelist. In later chapters, concentrating on Dickens and Thackeray, he examines how the male novelist is defined against multiple images of unmanliness. These chapters illustrate the investment made by men in constructing male 'others', those sources of difference that are constantly produced and then crushed from within gender divide. By analysing how Victorian literary texts both reveal and reconcile historical anxieties about the meaning of manliness, Dowling argues that masculinity is a complex construction rather than a natural given.

The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel

The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Tara MacDonald
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317317807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
By tracing the rise of the New Man alongside novelistic changes in the representations of marriage, MacDonald shows how this figure encouraged Victorian writers to reassess masculine behaviour and to re-imagine the marriage plot in light of wider social changes. She finds examples in novels by Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and George Gissing.

The Measure of Manliness

The Measure of Manliness PDF Author: Karen Bourrier
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Sheds new light on the narrative importance of the disabled man in Victorian literature and culture

Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era

Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era PDF Author: Susan Walton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351156020
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Beginning with the premise that women's perceptions of manliness are crucial to its construction, The author focuses on the life and writings of Charlotte Yonge as a prism for understanding the formulation of masculinities in the Victorian period. Yonge was a prolific writer whose bestselling fiction and extensive journalism enjoyed a wide readership. The author situates Yonge's work in the context of her family connections with the army, showing that an interlocking of worldly and spiritual warfare was fundamental to Yonge's outlook. For Yonge, all good Christians are soldiers, and Walton argues persuasively that the medievalised discourse of sanctified violence executed by upright moral men that is often connected with late nineteenth-century Imperialism began earlier in the century, and that Yonge's work was one major strand that gave it substance. Of significance, Yonge also endorsed missionary work, which she viewed as an extension of a father's duties in the neighborhood and which was closely allied to a vigorous promotion of refashioned Tory paternalism. The author's study is rich in historical context, including Yonge's connections with the Tractarians, the effects of industrialization, and Britain's Imperial enterprises. Informed by extensive archival scholarship, Walton offers important insights into the contradictory messages about manhood current in the mid-nineteenth century through the works of a major but undervalued Victorian author.

The Victorian Novel and Masculinity

The Victorian Novel and Masculinity PDF Author: P. Mallett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113749154X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
What did it mean, in the rapidly changing world of Victorian England, to 'be a man'? In essays written specially for this volume, nine distinguished scholars from Britain and the USA show how Victorian novelists from the Brontës to Conrad sought to discover what made men, what broke them, and what restored them.

Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature

Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature PDF Author: E. Godfrey
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230294995
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Now in paperback, this book considers crime fighting from the perspective of the civilian city-goer, from the mid-Victorian garotting panics to 1914. It charts the shift from the use of body armour to the adoption of exotic martial arts through the works of popular playwrights and novelists, examining changing ideals of urban, middle-class heroism.

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature PDF Author: Dennis Denisoff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429018177
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 753

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity PDF Author: Laura Eastlake
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198833032
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Romans in Victorian literature are at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire: this volume examines how these manifold and often contradictory representations are deployed in a range of ways in the works of authors from Thomas Macaulay to Rudyard Kipling to create useable models of masculinity.

The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel PDF Author: Francis O'Gorman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470779853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities

Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities PDF Author: Serena Trowbridge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351553364
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Drawing on recent theoretical developments in gender and men?s studies, Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities shows how the ideas and models of masculinity were constructed in the work of artists and writers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Paying particular attention to the representation of non-normative or alternative masculinities, the contributors take up the multiple versions of masculinity in Dante Gabriel Rossetti?s paintings and poetry, masculine violence in William Morris?s late romances, nineteenth-century masculinity and the medical narrative in Ford Madox Brown?s Cromwell on His Farm, accusations of ?perversion? directed at Edward Burne-Jones?s work, performative masculinity and William Bell Scott?s frescoes, the representations of masculinity in Pre-Raphaelite illustration, aspects of male chastity in poetry and art, Tannh?er as a model for Victorian manhood, and masculinity and British imperialism in Holman Hunt?s The Light of the World. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the far-reaching effects of the plurality of masculinities that pervade the art and literature of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.