Dashiell Hammett's fiction and detective pulps generally, offered the reader a chance to participate in vicarious power, by giving them a sense of the profession of detection, both in and out of the stories. It was the realism of the detective figure that allowed the audience to relate to him. What the detective offers the reader is an intensely powerful performance of masculinity that is at once ordinary in physicality and intelligence and extraordinary in the power it affords him. This power comes from his professional abilities, which allow him to transcend physical and class limitations. The detective story allows the reader to identify with the detective, and the detective pulps both in the stories and in their other sections offer the reader lessons in the profession of detection. Through this identification and education there is a kind of transference of the detective's power to the reader. The detective story offers the reader a chance to be powerful in a corrupt world, but since the detective is never able to fully rid the world of corruption, the story also offers the reader an opportunity to escape the corrupt world by putting the story down (essentially locating the corruption of the world within the pulp itself). In this escape, the reader inevitably feels happiness and contentment because his real world (though not as exciting or powerful as the detective's) is safe. / Graduation date: 2002

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-241)

Thesis (M.A.) -- Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on 25 Apr., 2008). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-[213]). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb 18, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Thesis advisor: Dr. Elisa Glick. Includes bibliographical references.

This study analyzes figurations of masculine pregnancy in early modern texts. Because no systematic methodology for conducting such an analysis yet exists, I have synthesized scholarship from anthropology, medicine, and psychoanalysis to construct an appropriate paradigm. Specifically, I bring together the anthropologist's "couvade," the physician's "couvade syndrome," and the psychoanalyst's gender-inflected model of the unconscious. Informed by this interdisciplinary scholarship, I offer a composite theory of couvade desire. I then apply that theoretical model to early modern figurations of masculine pregnancy. I find that the pervasive use of such figurations during the period results from ahistorical bodily disparities and historically-specific epistemological circumstances. The so-called "literary couvade" thus modulates: it directly challenges essentialist claims on the one hand, while simultaneously acknowledging the inexorable link between masculinity and a bodily incapability to give birth. Masculinity, in this model, appears disabled.Mitigating the disability, however, is a cultural imaginary unfettered by modern anatomical knowledge. Key aspects of human reproduction were still seductively obscure in the early modern period. Women birthed babies, that much was plain; but, perhaps men had a compensatory system of reproduction. Perhaps, some speculated, that system was superior to the messy, merely material capability exclusive to women. Masculinity could, in this regard, rival maternity for social significance without disclosing any act of appropriation from maternity. Such a dynamic resembles closely Rene Girard's paradigm of "mimetic desire." Crucial to mimetic desire is an indifference to the ostensible object on the part of both rival subjects. Relating this to the early modern "literary couvade," I conclude that figurations of masculine pregnancy emerge from a compensatory desire: the desire to mollify an apparent lack with the reduction in significance of the rival's manifest capability.

This thesis is a literary thematic analysis of Mark Behr's novels The Smell of Apples (1996) and Embrace (2000). Through these novels, Behr explores the nature of masculine identities and the ways in which they are developed through a process of adolescent males observing and interacting with their parents and the society in which they live. The development of the two protagonists is traced and white hegemonic attitudes to masculinity in South Africa are exposed. The novels are of importance as these hegemonic attitudes continue to exist within South Africa today. The focus of this analysis is on white adolescent masculinities and the ways in which Behr illustrates the effects of apartheid society on their development. The study makes an in-depth analysis of the plot and themes and the way in which these guide the reader into a critical awareness of socially constructed masculine identities. Each of the four themes - namely, sexuality, race, gender and land - is explored in this thesis and careful consideration is given to the techniques Behr uses in his writing. Of importance to this thesis are the interrelationships between character, themes and the context of the novels. While the novels are not regarded as a case study, this thesis repeatedly demonstrates the socio-political awareness that Behr uses in order to offer his reader insight into the significant realities that have faced adolescent males as they construct their identities. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

This dissertation comprises a literary investigation of the way in which Toni Morrison is able to transcend stereotypes associated with African American masculinity within a selection of her works namely, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby and Paradise. I apply Carl Jung’s transcendent concept of the paradoxical Self as a lens through which to analyse Morrison’s different representations, illustrating how this concept affects the formation of identity and an understanding of masculinity. I also make use of Frantz Fanon, who suggests that Jung’s concept of the Self is a way in which black men are able to understand their experience of the world, in that such an experience is paradoxical in nature. It is this paradoxical experience of the world that I argue Morrison highlights in her male characters. In examining Morrison’s representations of masculinity, I also illustrate the intersection of race and gender and how this intersection affects identity creation, given the unique position that African American men occupy within American society. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

This dissertation covers five female Victorian authors (Elizabeth Gaskell, M.E. Braddon, Dinah Craik, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Edith Nesbit) and the representations of masculinity in their novels. By taking a masculinity studies approach, this dissertation finds that these novels, in an attempt to gain authority and legitimacy in the male-dominated social sphere, often promoted middle-class masculine gender identities as the dominant, ideal masculinity for others. I will argue that female authors in the Victorian period took part in this struggle over re/defining hegemonic male gender identity in different ways, in different genres, for different purposes. Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South seek to ensure middle-class dominance over the working classes. Braddon’s novels Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd illustrate the unnaturalness of gender (and thus to call into question notions of “natural” differences between men and women, or men and other men) and broaden the definition of acceptable gender identities for men and, by extension, women. The authors of late-period children’s literature created texts that either changed or shield from change both male and female gender identities to define the proper way to educate children during a time when gender roles were undergoing changes due to innovations in industry, education, and calls for equal rights for women and non-hegemonic men. All of these texts display a great amount of confidence in the power of literature to shape gender identity. The male characters in novels covered in this dissertation help govern the individual from abstract potential to concrete reality in terms of how masculinity is lived in the everyday world. While pamphlets, medical journals, and conduct books can instruct the reader on ideal conduct (or, conversely, warn against inappropriate conduct) for men, women, boys, and girls, these texts often function in the abstract. The belief held by these authors in the power of literature is enables them to position fictional men in the real world under the assumption that these characters are therefore able to “live out” these ideas of what is and what is not appropriate in performing one’s male gender identity. / Department of English