Anxious Men

Clive Baldwin is Honorary Associate of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The Open University and formerly Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Arts, The Open University. His publications include a review of Maggie McKinley, Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950-75 in Culture, Society & Masculinities, 8:1, 2016, 'Digressing from the point: Holden Caulfield's women' in Sarah Graham. J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (London: Routledge, 2007), and ‘"A certain ill-defined disgrace": masculinity and sexuality in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach', English Review, 2011.

Anxious Men is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship concerned with American masculinity as Baldwin explores how “diverse, contradictory, conflicted and contested” it is during the 1940s and 1950s (235). The legacy of the Depression and the Second World War created a crisis over what constituted a masculine identity, which, as Baldwin investigates, led to conservatism and rebellion. The array of masculine representations explored in the study, from office workers to cowboys, soldiers, queer representations, and minority perspectives, provides evidence of how rich and diverse contradictions were to constructions of the masculine gender during the early Cold War era.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: anxiety, conformity and masculinity1. ‘Organisation Man’, domestic ideology and manhood2. ‘Everything in him had come undone’: violent aggression, courage, and masculine identity3. Representing sexualities and gender4. Identity and assimilation in Jewish-American fiction5. African-American identity and masculinityAfterwordWorks cited and consultedIndex