Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity

by James Eli Adams

Overview

A Choice "Outstanding Academic Book for 1996"

While drawing on work in feminism, queer theory, and cultural history, Dandies and Desert Saints challenges scholars to rethink simplistic notions of Victorian manhood. James Eli Adams examines masculine identity in Victorian literature from Thomas Carlyle through Oscar Wilde, analyzing authors who identify the age's ideal of manhood as the power of self-discipline. What distinguishes Adams's book from others in the recent explosion of interest in masculinity is his refusal to approach masculinity primarily in terms of "patriarchy" or "phallogocentrism" or within the binary of homosexualities and heterosexualities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801430176
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	12/07/1995
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	1500L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

James Eli Adams is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of A History of Victorian Literature.

Editorial Reviews

Offers a rich and complex argument.... Builds on important work by Victorianists such as Linda Dowling, Norma Clarke, and Herbert Sussman, and is as much at home with Walter Houghton as with Michel Foucault. By foregrounding issues of gender and placing these ideas in a more precise social and historical context than is usual, Dandies and Desert Saints deepens and expands the discussion of masculinities in the Victorian period.

Journal of the History of Sexuality - Joseph H. O'Mealy

Offers a rich and complex argument.... Builds on important work by Victorianists such as Linda Dowling, Norma Clarke, and Herbert Sussman, and is as much at home with Walter Houghton as with Michel Foucault. By foregrounding issues of gender and placing these ideas in a more precise social and historical context than is usual, Dandies and Desert Saints deepens and expands the discussion of masculinities in the Victorian period.

--Joseph H. O'Mealy, Department of English, University of Hawaii at Manoa "Journal of the History of Sexuality"

From the Publisher