Title
Gender, race, and mourning in American modernism [electronic resource] / Greg Forter.
ISBN
9781107004726
9781139080798 (electronic book)
Imprint
Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Language
English
Description
vii, 217 p.
Call Number
PS310.M57 F67 2011
Dewey Decimal Classification
813/.52093532
Summary
"American modernist writers' engagement with changing ideas of gender and race often took the form of a struggle against increasingly inflexible categories. Greg Forter interprets modernism as an effort to mourn a form of white manhood that fused the 'masculine' with the 'feminine'. He argues that modernists were engaged in a poignant yet deeply conflicted effort to hold on to socially 'feminine' and racially marked aspects of identity, qualities that the new social order encouraged them to disparage. Examining works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Willa Cather, Forter shows how these writers shared an ambivalence toward the feminine and an unease over existing racial categories that made it difficult for them to work through the loss of the masculinity they mourned. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism offers a bold new reading of canonical modernism in the United States"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
Machine generated contents note: Introduction; 1. Gender, melancholy, and the whiteness of impersonal form in The Great Gatsby; 2. Redeeming violence in The Sun Also Rises: phallic embodiment, primitive ritual, fetishistic melancholia; 3. Versions of traumatic melancholia: the burden of white man's history in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!; 4. The Professor's House: primitivist melancholy and the gender of Utopian forms; Afterword; Index.
