1st Edition

New Men in Trollope's Novels Rewriting the Victorian Male

By Margaret Markwick Copyright 2007
    228 Pages
    by Routledge

    228 Pages
    by Routledge

    New Men in Trollope's Novels challenges the popular construction of Victorian men as patriarchal despots and suggests that hands-on fatherhood may have been a nineteenth-century norm. Beginning with an evaluation of the evidence for cultural determinations of masculinity during Trollope's times, the author sets the stage with a discussion of the religious, philosophical, and educational influences that informed the evolution of Trollope's personal views of masculinity as he grew from boyhood into later manhood. Her treatment of his novels, drawing on a wide selection from across the oevre, shows that sensitive examination of Trollope's texts discovers him advancing a startlingly modern model of manhood under a veneer of conformity. Trollope's independent views on child-rearing, education, courtship, marriage, parenthood, and gay men are also discussed within the context of Victorian culture in this witty, original, and immensely knowledgeable study of Victorian masculinity.

    Contents: Introduction: Trollope past and present; The making of Victorian manliness; Men in fiction; Telling masculinities; The preux chevalier: 'sans peur et sans reproche'; From birth to man's estate; Sex and the single man; Husbands, fathers, sons; Smoking rooms: bawdy jokes; Trollope editions used in this book; Select bibliography; Index.

    Biography

    Margaret Markwick