The New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography (review)
Year: 2009

members from hostile male authority, as well as to stage acts of rebellion against the institution itself. The theme of rebelliousness carries over into subsequent chapters as well. Indeed, if I have a criticism of the book as a whole, it is that Syrett does not consider the self fashioned rebelliousness of American fraternity life in relation to the national myth America's revolutionary personality. Chapter two describes the divergence of a secularized definition of manliness from the clerical or sacred manliness that had defined the earlier fraternal organizations and higher education ethos more generally. Fraternity men increasingly demanded that colleges and universities prepare them for lives outside of ministry; fraternities provided wealthier collegians an opportunity to define themselves apart from poorer and also pious classmates. Chapter three details how fraternities went national over the course of the middleyears of the nineteenth century. "Membership in a national organization," Syrett finds, created the "imagined fraternity" which in turn provided men from disparate regions and backgrounds the opportunity to define themselves as the natural leaders of the nation and embodiment of its best values. (118 119) The books next and possibly best chapter details the emergence of a recognizably modern fraternity man, one defined increasingly through class and economic advantage, athletic achievement, and "a properly enacted masculinity" (181) defined increasingly in terms of sexual achievement and white Protestant superiority. With the increasing numbers of American women pursuing higher education, the hitherto secondary role of sexual identity and performance becomes a strikingly visible feature of fraternal identity in the 20th century, arguably the measure of fraternal "success" in the 20th century. (228) Chapter six and the book's conclusion return us to a terrain familiar enough from movies and media reports of the last thirty years: death from alcohol poisoning; demeaning and life threatening hazing rituals; drunken brawls and property destruction; a misogynistic culture which rewards puerile attitudes toward women and implicitly sponsors sexual violence; and a vigilant anti gay climate enforced ironically some might say through orientation tests, genital measurement, and other forms of homosocial behavior that indulge the very homoeroticism they would suppress. Although as social historian Syrett is deeply attentive to a regionally and generically diverse archive (personal correspondence, institutional records, memoirs, campus novels, and older histories) he is unafraid to make judicious use of cultural and sexuality theory to make sense of the historical material. This well written, carefully argued, and (in the conclusion) deftly polemical book is an excellent example of what modern historiography can achieve. It should be required reading for campus administrators, if not the parents of prospective fraternity members, and will in addition be of use to any American Studies scholar interested in gender, masculinity studies, social history, institutional history, literary and cultural studies. University of Western Ontario (Canada) Bryce Traister