Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity
A Choice "Outstanding Academic Book for 1996"While drawing on work in feminism, queer theory, and cultural history, Dandies and Desert Saints challenges scholars to rethink simplistic notions of Victorian manhood. James Eli Adams examines masculine identity in Victorian literature from Thomas Carlyle through Oscar Wilde, analyzing authors who identify the age's ideal of manhood as the power of self-discipline. What distinguishes Adams's book from others in the recent explosion of interest in...
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While drawing on work in feminism, queer theory, and cultural history, Dandies and Desert Saints challenges scholars to rethink simplistic notions of Victorian manhood. James Eli Adams examines masculine identity in Victorian literature from Thomas Carlyle through Oscar Wilde, analyzing authors who identify the age's ideal of manhood as the power of self-discipline. What distinguishes Adams's book from others in the recent explosion of interest in masculinity is his refusal to approach masculinity primarily in terms of "patriarchy" or "phallogocentrism" or within the binary of homosexualities and heterosexualities. He uncovers unexpected complexities in - and similarities among - icons of middle-class masculinity: the dandy, the gentleman, the priest, the prophet, and the soldier. The book approaches masculinity as a social norm and a calculated rhetorical construction, thus arguing that concepts such as "effeminate" and "unmanly" have been misunderstood. Adams brings to light a wealth of neglected affinities among widely disparate writers - such as Carlyle and Walter Pater; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Charles Kingsley - and reshapes familiar outlines of Victorian literary history.
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction11Dandies and Prophets: Spectacles of Victorian Masculinity212"A Sort of Masonry": Secrecy and "Manliness" in Early Victorian Brotherhoods613Imagining the Science of Renunciation: Manhood and Abasement in Kingsley and Tennyson1074Muscular Aestheticism: Masculine Authority and the Male Body1495Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Masks and Masculinity in Pater's Aestheticism183Afterword229Works Cited233Index245
\ From the Publisher"Offers a rich and complex argument. . . builds on important work by Victorianists such as Linda Dowling, Norma Clarke, and Herbert Sussman, and is as much at home with Walter Houghton as with Michel Foucault. By foregrounding issues of gender and placing these ideas in a more precise social and historical context than is usual, Dandies and Desert Saints deepens and expands the discussion of masculinities in the Victorian period."-Joseph H. O'Mealy, Department of English, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Journal of the History of Sexuality\ \
