Publisher's Synopsis
Revision with unchanged content. This study attempts to gender men by theorizing masculinities in American culture and literature. It tries to demonstrate that men, like women, are also gendered beings; that they have undergone specific social, cultural, and historical gendering processes; and that, in contemporary American culture, such gendering processes play a key role in men's lives as well as their literary representations. Crossing the divide between reality and fiction, then, the book underlines the constant interplay between society and literature, exploring both cultural and literary constructions of masculinity in the U.S. Even though the traditional patriarchal construction of masculinity seems deeply ingrained in the cultural and literary history of the U.S., the book argues that what was culturally constructed might, hopefully, be culturally de-constructed, too, and that American literature plays a fundamental role in this de-construction and re-presentation.
