Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750 - 2000 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780739133651)

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?".

Author: Sarah Ailwood
ISBN-10: 0739133659
ISBN-13: 9780739133651
Publisher: Lexington Books
Language: English
Published: 12/01/2009
Pages: 280
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2010