Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading

by Clinton Machann

Overview

Offering provocative readings of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Clough's Amours de Voyage, and Browning's The Ring and the Book, Clinton Machann employs the methods of literary Darwinism to shed light on the important issue of masculinity in the Victorian epic. Machann's central argument is that the drives and tendencies of human nature, as well as a writer's specific historical and cultural context, are important for understanding the Victorian long poem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781409475705
Publisher:	Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	04/28/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Clinton Machann is professor of English at Texas A&M University, USA

Table of Contents

Contents: Introduction; Tennyson's Arthur and manly codes of behavior; Barret Browning's construction of masculinity in Aurora Leigh; Clough's ambivalent Victorian manhood; Browning's chivalrous Christianity; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

'Clint Machann's book is a work of mature scholarship and fresh vision. Machann combines an informed understanding of human universals with historicist insights into the culturally conditioned construction of sexual identities. As perhaps the first critic of Victorian poetry to have assimilated contemporary evolutionary psychology, Machann offers something genuinely new to his field. After reading Machann, we understand these poems better. That surely is one of the chief aims of all literary scholarship.' Joseph Carroll, University of Missouri, St. Louis, USA '... thoughtfully reckons with the accusations levelled at literary Darwinism. In reviving interest in the cohesive impulses of Victorian poetry, and in the study of what is "essential" about us rather than culturally-constructed, this book makes an important contribution to Victorian literary studies.' nbol-19

From the Publisher