Women Constructing Men

Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750 - 2000

Sarah S. G. Frantz, Katharina Rennhak

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780739133675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

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?".

Table of contents

• Chapter 1 Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750-2000: An Introduction
• Chapter 2 Happy Men?: Mid-Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and Ideal Masculinity
• Chapter 3 Male Privilege in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer
• Chapter 4 The Medium Makes the Man: Anne Plumptre’s Something New and The History of Myself and My Friend
• Chapter 5 “Too much in the common Novel style”: Reforming Masculinities in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
• Chapter 6 Constructing Masculine Narrative: Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor
• Chapter 7 The Lifted Veil: George Eliot’s Experiment with First-Person Narrative
• Chapter 8 Assimilating the “pretty youngster”: George Eliot’s Eroticized Men on the Borderlines of Morality, Religion, Race, and Nation
• Chapter 9 “His spirituality or his manliness”: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s (Re)Constructions of Christian Masculinity
• Chapter 10 The Differential Construction of Masculinity in the Writings of Virginia Woolf
• Chapter 11 Knitting Paradise Lost: Masculinity and Domesticity in the Novels of Carol Shields
• Chapter 12 Looking (Im)Properly: Women Objectifying Men’s Bodies in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction
• Chapter 13 Unmaking the Self-Made Man: Louise Erdrich’s Fictional Exploration of Masculinity
• Chapter 14 “I’ve tried my entire life to be a good man”: Suzanne Brockmann’s Sam Starrett, Ideal Romance Hero
• Bibliography