Research Catalog

Title

Women constructing men : female novelists and their male characters, 1750-2000 / edited by Sarah S.G. Frantz and Katharina Rennhak.

Publication

Lanham : Lexington Books, ©2010.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Frantz, Sarah S. G.
• Rennhak, Katharina.

Description

vi, 273 pages; 24 cm

Summary

Female novelists have always invested as much narrative energy in constructing their male characters - heroes and villains - as in envisioning their female protagonists, but this fact has received very little scholarly attention to date. In Women Constructing Men, scholars from Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain and the United States begin to sketch the outline of a new literary history of women writing men in the English-speaking world from the eighteenth century until today. By rediscovering forgotten texts, rereading novels by high canonical female authors, refocusing the interest in well-known novels, and analyzing contemporary narrative constructions of masculinity, the contributing scholars demonstrate that female authors create male characters every bit as complex as their male counterparts. Using a variety of theoretical models and coming to an equal variety of conclusions, the essays collected in Women Constructing Men skilfully demonstrate that the topic of female-authored masculinities not only allows scholars to re-read and re-discover almost every novel ever written by a woman writer, but also triggers reflections on a host of theoretical questions of gender and genre. In re-examining these male characters across literary history, these articles extend the feminist question of "Who has the authority to create a female character?" to "Who has the authority to create any character?". (Publisher).

Subject

• Geschichte 1750-2000
• English fiction > Women authors > History and criticism
• American fiction > Women authors > History and criticism
• Characters and characteristics in literature
• Men in literature
• Masculinity in literature
• 18.05 English literature
• 18.06 Anglo-American literature
• American fiction > Women authors
• English fiction > Women authors
• Frauenroman
• Mann Motiv
• Männlichkeit Motiv
• Englisch

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Female novelists and their male characters, 1750-2000: an introduction / Sarah S.G. Frantz and Katharina Rennhak -- Happy men?: mid-eighteenth-century women writers and ideal masculinity / Shawn Lisa Maurer -- Male privilege in Frances Burney's The wanderer / George E. Haggerty -- The medium makes the man: Anne Plumptre's Something new and The history of myself and my friend / Katharina Rennhak -- "Too much in the common novel style": reforming masculinities in Jane Austen's Sense and sensibility / Sarah Ailwood -- Constructing masculine narrative: Charlotte Brontë's The professor / Sara Pearson -- The lifted veil: George Eliot's experiment with first-person narrative / Frederick Burwick -- Assimilating the "pretty youngster": George Eliot's eroticized men on the borderlines of morality, religion, race, and nation / Rainer Emig -- "His spirituality or his manliness": Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's (re)constructions of Christian masculinity / Roxanne Harde -- The differential construction of masculinity in the writings of Virginia Woolf / Virginia Richter -- Knitting paradise lost: masculinity and domesticity in the novels of Carol Shields / Ellen McWilliams -- Looking (im)properly: women objectifying men's bodies in contemporary Australian women's fiction / Katherine Bode -- Unmaking the self-made man: Louise Erdrich's fictional exploration of masculinity / Angela Laflen -- "I've tried my entire life to be a good man": Suzanne Brockmann's Sam Starrett, ideal romance hero / Sarah S.G. Frantz.

ISBN

• 9780739133651
• 0739133659
• 9780739133675
• 0739133675
• 0739133667
• 9780739133668

LCCN

2009039378

OCLC

• ocn445480470
• 445480470
• SCSB-14527651

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library