Out of Bounds : Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism

Until recently, "masculinity" and its impact on literary production and reception have received scant attention in the field of literary criticism. Although critics certainly have been interested in examining gender, they have tended to be far more concerned with the "feminine" side of the equation than with the "masculine." This book is an attempt to redress that imbalance. Positing that patriarchy victimizes men as well as women, the fifteen original essays in Out of Bounds explore how certain male writers from the American and British canon have responded to the confines of the masculine code. The contributors apply a wide range of critical approaches and probe the gendered perspective in a variety of telling ways. John, John, I Blush For Thee! : Mapping Gender Discourses In Paradise Lost / Joseph Wittreich -- Job's Wife And Sterne's Other Women / Melvyn New -- Where's Poppa? Or, The Defeminization Of Blake's Little Black Boy / Donald Ault -- Bifurcated Female Space Of Desire : Shelley's Confrontation With Language And Silence / Laura Claridge -- Beyond The Fragmented Word : Keats At The Limits Of Patrilineal Language / Marlon B. Ross -- Vanity Fair : Listening As A Rhetorician--and A Feminist / James Phelan -- Projection And The Female Other : Romanticism, Browning, And The Victorian Dramatic Monologue / U.c. Knoepflmacher -- I Stop Somewhere Waiting For You : Whitman's Femininity And The Reader Of Leaves Of Grass / Karen Oakes -- Rewriting The Male Plot In Wilkie Collins's No Name : Captain Wragge Orders An Omelette And Mrs. Wragge Goes Into Custody / Deirdre David -- Fictions Of Feminine Voice : Antiphony And Silence In Hardy's Tess Of The D'urbervilles / Margaret R. Higonnet -- Henry James And The Uses Of The Feminine / William Veeder -- Gesturing Toward An Open Space : Gender, Form, And Language In E.m. Forster's Howards End / Elizabeth Langland -- Resentments Of Robert Frost / Frank Lentricchia -- Faulkner's Fictional Photographs : Playing With Difference / Judith L. Sensibar -- Mappings Of Male Desire In Durrell's Alexandria Quartet : Homoerotic Negotiations In The Colonial Narrative / Joseph A. Boone. Edited By Laura Claridge And Elizabeth Langland. Includes Bibliographical References. Positing that patriarchy victimizes men as well as women, the 15 essays in this book explore how certain male writers from the American and British canon have responded to the confines of the masculine code. The contributors probe the gender perspective in a variety of ways.