Title: Men of their words
First published: 2007
Description: "Whereas the centrality of femininity to nineteenth-century French fiction has been the focus of widespread critical attention, masculinity has, until recently, received little sustained treatment in either the literary or socio-historical domains. In this book, Nigel Harkness uses the fiction of George Sand (1804-76), the pre-eminent woman writer of the period, to explore questions of masculinity as they pertain to the nineteenth-century French novel, and to map out new approaches to the study of literary masculinity." "Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and narrative, Harkness reveals how Sand's novels repeatedly focus on a nexus of language, masculinity and power, in which narrative is both a vehicle for the expression of manhood, and a site where masculinity is discursively performed. Masculinity is thus reconfigured in Sand's fiction as an identity constituted as much through words as through actions. Analysis of these performances of masculinity offers fresh insights into gendered processes of literary representation in the nineteenth-century French novel."--Jacket.
Subjects: Masculinity in literature, Criticism and interpretation, French literature, French fiction, history and criticism, Masculinité dans la littérature, LITERARY CRITICISM, European, French
People: George Sand (1804-1876)
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PQ2419 .H37 2007