Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature ― Castration, Narration, and a Sense of the Beginning 1919-1945

This book is about the modernist narrative voice and its correlation to medical, mythological, and psychoanalytic images of emasculation between 1919 and 1945. It shows how special-effects of rhetoric and form inspired by outré modernist developments in psychoanalysis, occultism, and negative philosophy reshaped both narrative structure and the literary depiction of modern masculine identity. In acknowledging early twentieth-century Anglo-American literature’s self-conscious and self-reflexive understanding of the effect of textual production, this engaging new study depicts a history of writers and readers understanding the role of textual absence in the development and chronicling of masculine anxiety and optimism.

Allan Johnson is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, UK. He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave, 2014) and numerous articles on modernism, esotericism, gender studies, and narrative theory. He has previously taught at the University of Leeds, Birkbeck University of London, and City University of Hong Kong.