Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature - Hardcover

Greven, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1403969116 ISBN 13: 9781403969118

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Synopsis

This book explores the construction of male sexuality in nineteenth-century American literature and comes up with some startling findings. Far from desiring heterosexual sex and wishing to bond with other men through fraternity, the male protagonists of classic American literature mainly want to be left alone. Greven makes the claim that American men, eschewing both marriage and male friendship, strive to remain emotionally and sexually inviolate. Examining the work of traditional authors - Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Cooper, Irving, Stowe - Greven discovers highly untraditional and transgressive representations of desire and sexuality. Objects of desire from both women and other men, the inviolate males discussed in this study overturn established gendered and sexual categories, just as this study overturns archetypal assumptions about American manhood and American literature.

About this title

About the Author:

David Greven is  Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, USA. His books include Intimate Violence: Hitchcock, Sex and Queer Theory (Oxford UP), Ghost Faces: Hollywood and Post-Millennial Masculinity (SUNY), and The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender (Ohio State UP). Greven's essays  have been published in journals such as American Quarterly, Genders, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Leviathan, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Cinema Journal, and Jump Cut. He is on the editorial boards of Legacy, Cinema Journal, Genders, and Poe Studies.

Review:

"There is much to value in Greven's work. Beyond the strong readings, of Irving and Hawthorne in particular, and beyond the keen sense it shows of the collision between Jacksonian ideals of the self-made man and reformist insistences on purity and sentimental propriety, the book offers a bracing take on the dynamics of male intimacies in the nineteenth century, one that recognizes the presence of a variety of sentimental modes but insists too on the rivalry, fear, violence, and enmity that made the world of homosociality no less perilous, for the sexually nonnormative, than the world of reproductive heterosexuality." - Peter Coviello, Studies in American Fiction

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1403969116
• ISBN 13: 9781403969118
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 306