Modernism and Masculinity

Modernism and Masculinity investigates the varied dimensions and manifestations of masculinity in the modernist period. Thirteen essays from leading scholars reframe critical trends in modernist studies by examining distinctive features of modernist literary and cultural work through the lens of masculinity and male privilege. The volume attends to masculinity as an unstable horizon of gendered ideologies, subjectivities and representational practices, allowing for fresh interdisciplinary treatments of celebrated and lesser-known authors, artists and theorists such as D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Henry Roth, Theodor Adorno and Paul Robeson as well as modernist avant-garde movements such as vorticism, surrealism and futurism. As diverse as the masculinities that were played out across the early twentieth century, the approaches and arguments featured in this collection will appeal especially to scholars and students of modernist literature and culture, gender studies and English literature more broadly.

Introduction Natalya Lusty; Part I. Fields of Production: 1. 'Virile Thought': modernist maleness, poetic forms and practices Rachel Blau DuPlessis; 2. 'That Man in My Mouth': editing, masculinity and modernism Melissa Jane Hardie; 3. Towards a gendered media ecology Julian Murphet; Part II. Masculinity in Crisis: 4. Nothing to be done: masculinity and the emergence of Irish modernism Ronan McDonald; 5. Marvellous masculinity: futurist strategies of self-transfiguration through the maelstrom on modernity Cinzia Blum; 6. Surrealist masculinities: sexuality and the economies of experience Natalya Lusty; Part III. New Men: 7. The new womanly Mensch? Modernism, Jewish masculinity and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep Maren Linett; 8. Robeson agonistes James Donald; 9. The figure of Crusoe David Marriott; 10. 'What I don't seem to see at all is you': D. H. Lawrence's The Fox and the politics of masquerade Thomas Strychacz; Part IV. Masculine Form: 11. Engendering Adorno: on time and masculinity in modernist music Tyrus Miller; 12. Stag party: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and vorticist organicism Jessica Burstein; 13. Bravura or bravado? Reading Ezra Pound's Cantos Peter Nicholls.

Natalya Lusty is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (2007) and, with Helen Groth, Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History (2013). She is currently writing a book on feminist manifestos and the history of radical feminism.
Julian Murphet is Professor in Modern Film and Literature and Director of the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia at the University of New South Wales. His publications include Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge, 2009), Literature and Visual Technologies (2003), and Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge, 2001). He has previously co-edited books on J. M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy. He is the editor of the new journal in Modernist studies, Affirmations: Of the Modern.