Bachelors, manhood, and the novel, 1850-1925 / Katherine V. Snyder.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Snyder, Katherine V., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924--Characters--Bachelors.

Conrad, Joseph.

James, Henry, 1843-1916--Characters--Bachelors.

James, Henry.

American fiction--Male authors--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Bachelors in literature.

American fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

English fiction--Male authors--History and criticism.

Masculinity in literature.

First person narrative.

Men in literature.

English-speaking countries--Intellectual life--19th century.

English-speaking countries.

Physical Description:

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

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Bachelors, Manhood, & the Novel, 1850-1925

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

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

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

ISBN:

9781107116825

1107116821

9780521650465

0521650461

9780511006425

051100642X

9781280161964

1280161965

9780511117534

0511117531

9780511150005

0511150008

9780511303036

0511303033

9780511485312

051148531X

9780511052071

0511052073

OCLC:

191035667