Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Allan Johnson

   Pages 1-17

3. The Fisher King’s Wound

   • Allan Johnson

   Pages 19-50

4. The Cloud of Unknowing

   • Allan Johnson

   Pages 51-78

5. Rituals of Mourning

   • Allan Johnson

   Pages 79-106

6. Cupio Dissolvi

   • Allan Johnson

   Pages 107-136

7. The Sense of a Beginning

   • Allan Johnson

   Pages 137-164

8. Conclusion

   • Allan Johnson

   Pages 165-168

9. Back Matter

   Pages 169-173

   PDF

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.

• Psychosexuality
• Medicine
• Myth
• War
• Fisher King
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

  Allan Johnson

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.

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