Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence

Thomas Strychacz

ISBN 10: 0813031613 / ISBN 13: 9780813031613

Published by Univ Pr of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, U.S.A., 2008

About this Item

261pp. He focuses on the way some early twentieth-century writers portray masculinity as theatrical performance, and examines why scholars have generally overlooked that fact. Strychacz argues that writers such as Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence?often viewed as misogynist?actually represented masculinity in their works in terms of theatrical and rhetorical performances. They are theatrical in the sense that male characters keep staging themselves in competitive displays; rhetorical in the sense that these characters, and the very narrative form of the works in which they appear, render masculinity a kind of persuasive argument readers can and should debate. Clean. Seller Inventory # 009847

Bibliographic Details

Title: Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, ...

Publisher: Univ Pr of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, U.S.A.

Publication Date: 2008

Binding: Cloth

Condition: As New

Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket - Issued

Edition: 1st Printing

About this title

Synopsis:

In ""Dangerous Masculinities"", Thomas Strychacz has as his goal nothing less than to turn scholarship on gender and modernism on its head. He focuses on the way some early twentieth-century writers portray masculinity as theatrical performance, and examines why scholars have generally overlooked that fact.Strychacz argues that writers such as Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence - often viewed as misogynist - actually represented masculinity in their works in terms of theatrical and rhetorical performances. They are theatrical in the sense that male characters keep staging themselves in competitive displays; rhetorical in the sense that these characters, and the very narrative form of the works in which they appear, render masculinity as a kind of persuasive argument readers can and should debate.But perhaps most interesting is Strychacz's contention that scholarship has obscured the fact that often these writers were quite critical of masculinity. Writing with a clarity that allows him to both invoke the Schwarzeneggarian ""girly man"" and borrow from the theories of Judith Butler and Bertolt Brecht, he fashions a critical method with which to explore the ways in which scholars gender texts by the very act of reading.

Review:

Provocative and engaging, this book disrupts deeply held notions about the modernist canon and the practice of literary scholarship, and opens up new ways of reading familiar texts. - John Dudley, University of South Dakota