Masculinity as (a) Representation

Moving into the growing field of study of fictional representations of masculinity, this chapter provides an overview of studies of literary masculinities, briefly analyzing their origins, as well as their development and latest findings. The chapter then analyzes the new and numerous critical possibilities generated by a rereading of the literature by these studies. Like the issue of men in feminism in general, men’s participation in feminist literary criticism has been subject to much controversy, which this chapter specifically addresses. Equally controversial has been the (ir)relevance of the sex of the author to textual criticism, the focus of the next section. If masculine identity is plural, complex, and often contradictory, the fiction produced by white male authors may also be involved. Thus, I argue that the fiction written by these authors can produce both traditional and innovative representations of masculinity, as the chapter will also illustrate. By applying masculinity studies to the analysis of both social constructions and literary representations of masculinity, this chapter establishes a dialog between different disciplines—such as sociology and psychology, on the one hand, and cultural and literary studies, on the other—as well as critical theories—such as masculinity studies and literary critical theories—and questions the traditional divisions between society and culture, political practice and literature, the social (con)text and the literary text.