Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

How are men's sexualities played out in film, art, and comics? How do men work with femininities and women with masculinities? In what way does migration and religion interact in the cultivation of diasporic Muslim masculinities and alter social, cultural and familial relations? What is the relation between masculinities and disability? The ten chapters in the volume discuss the reconstruction of masculinities in and across particular times and cultural and geographic contexts. Each chapter sheds new light on the differences and complexities that constitute the making of masculinities in friendship and intimate relationships, religion, domestic violence, media, literature, and the arts. In highlighting the specificities of masculinities as they intersect with other coordinates of identity, the chapters collectively demonstrate how universalist models cannot accommodate for the diversities of gendered modes of being and becoming. The approach is interdisciplinary and international, and the authors draw on multiple research methodologies.

The literary 'middle ground', once dismissed by academia as insignificant, is the site of powerful anxieties about cultural authority that continue to this day. In short, the middlebrow matters . These essays examine the prejudices and aspirations at work in the 'battle of the brows', and show that cultural value is always relative and situational.