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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
"Wearing A Mask To Each Other": Masculinity & The Public Eye In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Shannon Branfield
"Wearing A Mask To Each Other": Masculinity & The Public Eye In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Shannon Branfield
Theses and Dissertations--English
Sensation fiction, as a genre, offers a field to explore the ways in which ideologies of masculinity are negotiated, contested, and enforced. The Victorian man has no respite from social surveillance; the public is always watching, always evaluating the performance. As these sensation fiction novels build on each other, a portrait of male claustrophobia in response to unceasing surveillance is revealed. The pressure this constant scrutiny puts on Victorian men is immense and sensation novels derive many thrilling plot twists from the dramatic lengths men to which men must go to protect themselves from this gaze. These habits persist even …
Rebooting Masculinity After 9/11: Male Heroism On Film From Bush To Trump, Owen R. Horton
Rebooting Masculinity After 9/11: Male Heroism On Film From Bush To Trump, Owen R. Horton
Theses and Dissertations--English
Conceptions of masculinity on film shifted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from representations of male heroism as invulnerable, powerful, and safe to representations of male heroism as resilient, vengeful, and vulnerable. At the same time, the antagonists of these films shifted towards representations as shadowy, unknowable, and disembodied. These changing representations, I argue, are windows into the anxieties Americans faced in the aftermath of the attacks. The continuing presentation of power as linked to violence, however, illustrates the ways in which conceptions of masculinity have stayed the same.
Hybridity, Trauma, And Queer Identity: Reading Masculinity Across The Texts Of Junot Díaz, Hannah Fraser Legris
Hybridity, Trauma, And Queer Identity: Reading Masculinity Across The Texts Of Junot Díaz, Hannah Fraser Legris
Theses and Dissertations--English
When writing about Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), I focus on the iterations of masculinity depicted and embodied by Yunior de las Casas, the primary narrator of this collection. I explore the links between diaspora, hybridity, masculinity, and trauma, arguing that both socio-historical and personal traumatic experience reverberates through the psyches and bodies of Díaz’s characters. I demonstrate the relationship between Yunior’s navigation of the United States and the Dominican Republic and his ever-shifting sexuality, self-presentation, and gender identity. The physical and discursive spaces he must …