Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781107004726)

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.

Author: Greg Forter
ISBN-10: 1107004721
ISBN-13: 9781107004726
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/14/2011
Pages: 226
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 01/01/2012