Gothic masculinity
Subtitle: effeminacy and the supernatural in English and German romanticism
By: Ellen Brinks.
Series: The Bucknell studies in eighteenth-century literature and culture
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Lewisburg, [Pa.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 219
Subjects: English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Masculinity in literature; German literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Literature, Comparative -- English and German; Literature, Comparative -- German and English; Gothic revival (Literature) -- Great Britain; Gothic revival (Literature) -- Germany; Romanticism -- Great Britain; Supernatural in literature; Romanticism -- Germany; Men in literature
Description: "Cultural and individual fantasies of masculinity enter troubling terrain in gothic tales of British and German Romanticism. In the interiority of dreams and visionary spaces, a male protagonist makes a fateful encounter with a supernaturalized force and finds himself dispossessed of his real and symbolic masculine estate. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary range of this recurring motif, Ellen Brinks traces "distressed masculinity" in canonical instances of gothic imagination - Byron's Oriental Tales and Coleridge's Christabel - but also in works such as Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Keats's Hyperion fragments, and Freud's letters and scientific writings." "Gothic tropes and tableaux of the effeminizing supernatural cross a range of genres and perplex social and "natural" distinctions concerning masculinity and male sexuality to produce multiple, often contradictory, identifications. They report, from various sites, increasing anxieties about male effeminacy or the emergence of a male "homosexual" identity within the fraught cultural desires during the Romantic period and its Freudian afterlife." "An elegant and compelling account of the construction of sex and gender in the Gothic, Gothic Masculinity will be of interest to scholars of sexuality, gender, queer theory, Romantic subjectivity, and the German and English Gothic."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 198-212) and index.
Table of contents: title: Hegel possessed : reading the gothic in the phenomenology of mind; title: The male romantic poet as gothic subject : Keats's Hyperion and The fall of hyperion : a dream; title: Sharing gothic secrets : Byron's The Giaour and Lara; title: "This dream it would not pass away" : Christabel and mimetic enchantment; title: The gothic romance of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess.