Kafka’s Gregor Samsa represents one version of masculinity’s vanishing point. Here is another: after the British Football Associa­tion had charged two rival players with misconduct following a fight during a match between Chelsea and Liverpool in February 1999, the man who threw the first punch alleged that he had been provoked by his opponent’s cries […]

Junger believed ‘the values of the bourgeois world’ to be incom­patible with what he called ‘the select embodiments of a powerful masculinity’ and on one occasion he even went so far as to depict combat as ‘the male form of procreation’ (quoted in Huyssen 1993: 10). But by no means every writer who has found […]

This was not to be. By the mid-nineteenth century, Johnson’s character had already been turned into caricature and he was remembered as a man whose fabulous eccentricities seemed to mark him out as a figure of fun, one whose ‘opinions’ were ‘fast becoming obsolete’ (Carlyle 1966 [1841]: 182). It was left to another Scottish writer, […]

So far we have been tracing the history of ‘the manly ideal’ and its countertypes in the modern era, looking especially closely at changing conceptions of the male body as it was re-imagined following the First World War. One disadvantage of Mosse’s account of the dominant form of masculinity — and this is also true […]

Histories of this kind are still too new to be wholly uncontroversial, but a useful starting point is George Mosse’s synoptic study of masculinity and modernity The Image of Man (1996), one of the last works written by a pioneer in the field. Mosse presents a broad brush survey that charts the rise and gradual […]

We begin this chapter in what has long been thought of as a quintessentially male arena: the battlefield. Towards the close of The Storm of Steel (1929), the extraordinary memoir of his experiences as an officer in the First World War, the German writer Ernst Junger recounts the story of how he escaped being captured, […]

The optimism of imaginative writers is countered to some extent by a more millennarial and troubling vision of gender and its future. A 1999 cover of the New Yorker magazine, in an issue devoted to ‘Style’ at the millennium captures this well. It depicts a robot undergoing what seems to be a complete servicing (Roberts […]

For all her bold exploration of gender in her science fiction LeGuin in Left Hand of Darkness is surprisingly phobic about the possi­bilities of same sex attraction, or even something more biologically complicated that her fictional Gethenians represent. Yet as we have seen the interwar period provided a fertile ground for women writers like Hall, […]

In thinking beyond femininity in its past and present incarnations, both theorists and imaginative writers have invented narratives in which feminine abjection can be transformed, displaced or otherwise evaded. One strategy, as we have seen, is to look to the past: when Бготё chooses to have the child Jane Eyre align her resistant and angry […]

Class and ethnicity were by no means the exclusive or local concerns of women from Britain or Ireland, but qualified and complicated in different ways all the new femininities invented and narrated by women in the Anglophone societies of the 1920s and 1930s, where women were newly enfranchised. Moreover, to see how some of the […]