1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910778868003321

Autore

Snyder Katherine V.

Titolo

Bachelors, manhood, and the novel, 1850-1925 / / Katherine V. Snyder [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 1999

ISBN

1-107-11682-1

0-511-00642-X

1-280-16196-5

0-511-11753-1

0-511-15000-8

0-511-30303-3

0-511-48531-X

0-511-05207-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (x, 285 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Disciplina

813/.409352041

Soggetti

American fiction - Male authors - History and criticism

Bachelors in literature

American fiction - 19th century - History and criticism

English fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

English fiction - Male authors - History and criticism

Masculinity in literature

First person narrative

Men in literature

English-speaking countries Intellectual life 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 258-278) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Trouble in paradise: bachelors and bourgeois domesticity -- Susceptibility and the single man: the constitution of the bachelor invalid -- Artist and a bachelor: Henry James, mastery and the life of art -- Way of looking on: bachelor narration in Joseph Conrad's.

Sommario/riassunto

Katherine Snyder's study explores the significance of the bachelor narrator, a prevalent but little-recognised figure in premodernist and



modernist fiction by male authors, including Hawthorne, James, Conrad, Ford and Fitzgerald. Snyder demonstrates that bachelors functioned in cultural and literary discourse as threshold figures who, by crossing the shifting, permeable boundaries of bourgeois domesticity, highlighted the limits of conventional masculinity. The very marginality of the figure, Snyder argues, effects a critique of gendered norms of manhood, while the symbolic function  of marriage as a means of plot resolution is also made more complex by the presence of the single man. Bachelor figures made, moreover, an ideal narrative device for male authors who themselves occupied vexed cultural positions. By attending to the gendered identities and relations at issue in these narratives, Snyder's study discloses the aesthetic and political underpinnings of the traditional canon of English and American male modernism.