Like a man: The production of masculinity in modern American fiction

My dissertation, Like a Man: The Production of Masculinity in Modern American Fiction, argues that major works of modern American literature use masculinity to produce alternatives to social conventions. Masculinity plays a crucial role in American modernism that I link to nineteenth-century dime novel Westerns through shared narrative style and political content. Rather than treating modernism's fixation on masculinity---most evident in a writer like Ernest Hemingway---as a failure to properly cope with shifting gender roles in the twentieth century, I read masculinity as a mode of gender performance that, in American literature from 1880 through 1950, consistently exposes the inadequacies of patriarchal family relations and heterosexual marriage conventions.; Beginning with a reading of nineteenth-century dime novel Westerns, my project interrogates the connection between masculinity and the male body, a connection that often serves to solidify male dominance. Dime novels and the social panic that surrounded them in the late nineteenth century exhibit the ways in which modern masculinity is detached from an essential connection to the male body. Through readings of Owen Wister's The Virginian , Willa Cather's O Pioneers! and My Antonia , Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, William Faulkner's Light in August, John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, and the novel and film versions of Shane, my dissertation argues that American modernist writers' fixation on masculinity has a direct literary precursor in dime novel Westerns and that masculinity is not an identity but instead a narrative form. In dime novel Westerns through American modernism, masculinity resists patriarchal property, family, and marriage conventions by thriving in open-ended narratives that produce alternative modes of social belonging.