Writing Men : Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man

Berthold Schoene-Harwood develops a trajectory of masculine emancipation from the monstrous imagery of nineteenth-century fiction to contemporary men writers' experimental new discourse of ecriture masculine.

In Writing Men, Berthold Schoene-Harwood develops a trajectory of masculine emancipation from the monstrous imagery of nineteenth-century fiction to contemporary men writers'' experimental new discourse of écriture masculine. Looking at 13 individual case studies, Schoene-Harwood outlines the historical development of literary representations of masculinity from Mary Shelley''s Frankenstein to Ian McEwan''s The Child in Time. Subdivided into four parts, the study''s first section takes a journey into the nineteenth-century pre-history of post-war and contemporary British men''s writing, introducing readers to literature''s capacity to both consolidate and unsettle traditional conceptions of femininity and masculinity. In Part II, detailed readings of modern classics such as Lord of the Flies, A Clockwork Orange, Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top reveal the persistence of patriarchal gender hierarchies in the 1950s and early 1960s. The third and central section explores the influence feminist thought