Embodying Masculinities—Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S. Culture and Literature

Most writings on the gendered social and cultural construction of the body, Armengol (English, U. of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) notes, have focused on the female body, leaving the male body as largely unexplored territory. In this volume, he presents nine essays that begin to fill the gap by examining the male body as a symbolic and gendered construction in US culture and literature. Topics include: negotiating hegemonic and subordinated masculinities in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; male bodies in 1930s American culture and literature; exploring the incorporeality of masculinity in 1950s American culture; male rock performance, glam, and the (re-)imagination of the male body in the 1960s and 1970s; the cyborg and the representation of masculinity and femininity in American science fiction literature and film of the 1980s; the villain's body and its role in shaping the heroic body in Hollywood action films of the 1990s; the failed hyper-masculinization of the hero in Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 1998 graphic novel 300 and its 2006 film adaptation, voicing the father's body in Janice Mirikitani's Asian American poetry; and the (de-)construction of Arab masculinities in post 9/11 American culture. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Josep M. Armengol received his PhD in English from the University of Barcelona. He is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. A renowned masculinity scholar, he has published in prestigious academic journals such as Signs, the Hemingway Review, and Men and Masculinities. His books include Debating Masculinity; Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities (Lang, 2010; winner of the 2010 literary scholarship prize of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies); Men in Color: Racialized Masculinities in U.S. Literature and Cinema; and Queering Iberia: Iberian Masculinities at the Margins (Lang, 2012). He is an international advisory editor for the journal Men and Masculinities and is working on a book on African American masculinities.