Sheds new light on the narrative importance of the disabled man in Victorian literature and culture

Thomas Strychacz challenges the traditional wisdom that Hemingway fashions a quintessentially masculine style that promotes an ideal of stoic, independent manhood, arguing instead that Hemingway's fiction poses masculinity as a theatrical performance.

This book focuses on men's bodies, emotions and material culture to offer a new understanding of masculinities in Britain in the long nineteenth century. Using objects as well as texts and images, it shows how idealised and ugly bodies, and the feelings they stimulated, helped convey ideas about manliness and unmanliness across society.

What Makes a Man, a Man? For centuries, being a man meant living a life of virtue and excellence. But then, through time, the art of manliness was lost. Now, after decades of excess and aimless drift, men are looking for something to help them live an authentic, manly life--a primer that can give their life real direction and purpose. This book holds the answers. To master the art of manliness, a man must live the seven manly virtues: Manliness, Courage, Industry, Resolution, Self-Reliance, Discipline, Honor. Each chapter covers one of the seven virtues and is packed with the best classic advice ever written down for men. From the philosophy of Aristotle to the speeches and essays of Theodore Roosevelt, these pages contain the manly wisdom of the ages--poems, quotes, and essays that will inspire you to live life to the fullest and realize your complete potential. Learn the art. Change your life. Become a man.

This book offers an innovative account of manliness in Britain between 1760 and 1900. Using diverse textual, visual and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies –often working-class ones – and the emotions and material culture associated with them. The book analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors and blacksmiths, brave firemen and noble industrial workers. It also investigates unmanly men, such as drunkards, wife-beaters and masturbators, who elicited disgust and aversion. Unusually, Manliness in Britain runs from the eras of feeling, revolution and reform to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy and mass media, periods often dealt with separately by historians of masculinities.

In this book, Colleen Conway looks at the construction of masculinity in New Testament depictions of Jesus. She argues that the New Testament writers necessarily engaged the predominant gender ideology of the Roman Empire, whether consciously or unconsciously. Although the notion of what constituted ideal masculinity in Greek and Roman cultures certainly pre-dated the Roman Empire, the emergence of the Principate concentrated this gender ideology on the figure of the emperor. Indeed, critical to the success of the empire was the portrayal of the emperor as the ideal man and the Roman citizen as one who aspired to be the same. Any person who was held up alongside the emperor as another source of authority would be assessed in terms of the cultural values represented in this Roman image of the "manly man." Conway examines a variety of ancient ideas of masculinity, as found in philosophical discourses, medical treaties, imperial documents, and ancient inscriptions. Manliness, in these accounts, was achieved through self-control over passions such as lust, anger, and greed. It was also gained through manly displays of courage, the endurance of pain, and death on behalf of others. With these texts as a starting point, Conway shows how the New Testament writings approach Jesus' gender identity. From Paul's early letters to the Gospels and Acts, to the book of Revelation, Christian writings in the Bible confront the potentially emasculating scandal of the cross and affirm Jesus as ideally masculine. Conway's study touches on such themes as the relationship between divinity and masculinity; the role of the body in relation to gender identity; and belief in Jesus as a means of achieving a more ideal form of masculinity. This impeccably researched and highly readable book reveals the importance of ancient gender ideology for the interpretation of Christian texts.

From the “gay gene” to the “female brain” and African American students’ insufficient “hereditary background” for higher education, arguments about a biological basis for human difference have reemerged in the twenty-first century. Measuring Manhood shows where they got their start. Melissa N. Stein analyzes how race became the purview of science in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America and how it was constructed as a biological phenomenon with far-reaching social, cultural, and political resonances. She tells of scientific “experts” who advised the nation on its most pressing issues and exposes their use of gender and sex differences to conceptualize or buttress their claims about racial difference. Stein examines the works of scientists and scholars from medicine, biology, ethnology, and other fields to trace how their conclusions about human difference did no less than to legitimize sociopolitical hierarchy in the United States. Covering a wide range of historical actors from Samuel Morton, the infamous collector and measurer of skulls in the 1830s, to NAACP leader and antilynching activist Walter White in the 1930s, this book reveals the role of gender, sex, and sexuality in the scientific making?and unmaking?of race.