Bachelors, manhood, and the novel, 1850-1925

Resource Information

The work Bachelors, manhood, and the novel, 1850-1925 represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Bachelors, manhood, and the novel, 1850-1925

Statement of responsibility

Katherine V. Snyder

Title variation

Bachelors, Manhood, & the Novel, 1850-1925

Creator

• Snyder, Katherine V

Author

• Snyder, Katherine V

Subject

• Bachelors in literature
• Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 -- Characters | Bachelors
• English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
• English fiction -- Male authors | History and criticism
• English-speaking countries -- Intellectual life -- 19th century
• First person narrative
• James, Henry, 1843-1916 -- Characters | Bachelors
• Masculinity in literature
• Men in literature
• American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• American fiction -- Male authors | History and criticism

Language

eng

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

Cataloging source

UkCbUP

Dewey number

813/.409352041

Index

index present

LC call number

PS374.B34

LC item number

S69 1999

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries