Men and feminism in modern literature

Descripción

Accepting the contention of feminists that the New Woman is here to stay, Declan Kibertd asks what kind of man will emerge as a response to the challenge which she poses. Although he finds some answers in the contemporary literature of women's liberation, it is perhaps surprisingly the leading male writers of the period 1890 to 1920 who provide more answers about the New Man. The problem faced by these writers was acute--how to create a woman who was both imperious and admirable, a man who was at once passive and exemplary. The boyish girls of Shakespeare's comedies had been unfailingly charming, but his womanly men had been exposed as public failures or moral weaklings. By the late nineteenth century, the passive male was a hero of Arnold and Tennyson, but the manly woman had come to be seen as a dark destroyer.^ ^^Separate chapters are devoted to the work of Strindberg, Ibsen and Hardy, three men who charted the rise of the New Woman, but the main section of the book traces the emergence of the New Man in the writings of Yeats, Lawrence and Joyce. These three authors have been repeatedly denounced by contemporary feminists, but are here shown to have been sexual radicals whose advanced ideas permeate the tracts of their most ardent detractors. Dominant themes include the pleasures and perils of androgyny, the problem of narcissism, the danger of encouraging an excessive sense of sexual difference, the vice of specialization, and the place of the radical will in the modern world. Wider cultural developments in the fields of psychology, advertising, clothing and fashion are also treated. The final chapter demonstrates how, after the 1920s, the ideas of these six men slowly passed into the popular culture, until they were reformulated on a more theoretical basis by today's feminists.^ ^^^This thought-provoking book will be of interest not only to students of literature, but also to anyone concerned with questions which have arisen in the wake of the current feminist movement.