The goal of this book is nothing less than to turn scholarship on gender and modernism on its head. The book focuses on the way some early twentieth-century writers portray masculinity as theatrical performance, and examines why scholars have generally overlooked that fact. It argues that writers such as Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence—often viewed as misogynist—actually represented masculinity in their works in terms of theatrical and rhetorical performances. They are theatrical in the sense that male characters keep staging themselves in competitive displays, rhetorical in the sense that the ... More

The goal of this book is nothing less than to turn scholarship on gender and modernism on its head. The book focuses on the way some early twentieth-century writers portray masculinity as theatrical performance, and examines why scholars have generally overlooked that fact. It argues that writers such as Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence—often viewed as misogynist—actually represented masculinity in their works in terms of theatrical and rhetorical performances. They are theatrical in the sense that male characters keep staging themselves in competitive displays, rhetorical in the sense that these characters, and the very narrative form of the works in which they appear, render masculinity a kind of persuasive argument readers can and should debate. Perhaps most interesting is the book's contention that scholarship has obscured the fact that often these writers were quite critical of masculinity. The book invokes the Schwarzeneggarian “girly man” and borrows from the theories of Judith Butler and Bertolt Brecht to fashion a critical method with which to explore the ways in which scholars gender texts by the very act of reading.