Covers wide range of popular British and American fiction and film including Westerns, spy fiction, science fiction and crime narratives.

How are men represented on the printed page, the stage and the screen? What do these representations say about masculinity in the past, the present, and the future? The twelve essays in this volume explore the different ways in which men and masculinity have been represented, from the plays of William Shakespeare to the science fiction of Richard K. Morgan, passing through classic fiction by Emily Brontë and Charles Dickens, and popular favourites by Terry Pratchett and Isaac Asimov, without forgetting the Star Wars saga. Collectively, these essays argue that, although much has been written about men, it has been done from a perspective that does not see masculinity as a specific feature in need of critical appraisal. Men need to be made aware of how they are represented in order to alter the toxic patriarchal models handed down to them and even break the extant binary gender models. For that, it is important that men distinguish patriarchy from masculinity, as is done here, and form anti-patriarchal alliances with each other and with women. This book is, then, an invitation to men’s liberation from patriarchy by raising an awareness of its crippling constraints.

The fifties marks the moment when a heterosexual/homosexual dualism came to dominate U.S. culture's thinking about masculinity. The films of this era record how gender and sexuality did not easily come together in a normative manhood common to American men. Instead these films demonstrate the widely held perception of a crises of masculinity. Masked Men documents how movies of the fifties represented masculinity as a multiple masquerade. Hollywood's star system positioned the male actor as a professional performer and as a body intended to solicit the erotic interest of male and female viewers alike. Drawing on publicity, poster art, fan magazines, and the popular press as a means of following the links between fifties stars, their films, and the social tensions of the period, Cohan juxtaposes Hollywood's narratives of masculinity against the personae of leading men like Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, William Holden, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and Rock Hudson. Masked Men focuses on the gender and sexual masquerades that organized their performances of masculinity on and off screen.

While masculinity has been an increasingly visible field of study within several disciplines (sociology, literary studies, cultural studies, film and tv) over the last two decades, it is surprising that analysis of contemporary representations of the first part of the century has yet to emerge. Professor Brian Baker, evolving from his previous work Masculinities in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000, intervenes to rectify the scholarship in the field to produce a wide-ranging, readable text that deals with films and other texts produced since the year 2000. Focusing on representations of masculinity in cinema, popular fiction and television from the period 2000-2010, he argues that dominant forms of masculinity in Britain and the United States have become increasingly informed by anxiety, trauma and loss, and this has resulted in both narratives that reflect that trauma and others which attempt to return to a more complete and heroic form of masculinity. While focusing on a range of popular genres, such as Bond films, war movies, science fiction and the Gothic, the work places close analyses of individual films and texts in their cultural and historical contexts, arguing for the importance of these popular fictions in diagnosing how contemporary Britain and the United States understand themselves and their changing role in the world through the representation of men, fully recognising the issues of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age. Baker draws upon current work in mobility studies and in the study of masculinities to produce the first book-length comparative study of masculinity in popular culture of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of Nineteenth-century frontier and western heroes, the figure re-emerges in 1930-50s America as the 'tough guy'. The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler ( The Big Sleep ) and James M. Cain ( Double Indemnity ) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender 'otherness', this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War, closing with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels ( For Love of Imabelle ) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition.

In Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality of imprisonment in American culture, illustrating how incarceration, an institution inseparable from race, has shaped and continues to shape U.S. history and literature in the starkest expression of what W.E.B. DuBois famously termed "the problem of the color line." A prison official in 1888 declared that it was the freeing of slaves that actually created prisons: "we had to establish means for their control. Hence came the penitentiary." Such rampant racism contributed to the criminalization of black masculinity in the cultural imagination, shaping not only the identity of prisoners (collectively and individually) but also America's national character. Caster analyzes the representations of imprisonment in books, films, and performances, alternating between history and fiction to describe how racism influenced imprisonment during the decline of lynching in the 1930s, the political radicalism in the late 1960s, and the unprecedented prison expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman Mailer, Caster also engages recent films such as American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison alongside prison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association. This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment has functioned as racial containment, a matter critical to U.S. history and literary study.

"This work analyzes the interracial relationships, the heterosexual masculine roles within the films and the various genres in which the buddy film has surfaced. The book is arranged in six chapters, each focusing upon a particular chronological era in the development of the interracial buddy film"--Provided by publisher.