Men and Masculinity. The Presentation of Men and Male Relationships in Three Contemporary British Novels

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 1999 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,7 (B-), Free University of Berlin (English Philology), language: English, abstract: The 1990s has witnessed a groundswell of interest in men and masculinity. The bookmarket saw countless publications, the media took up the topic and discussionsabout the 'nineties man' became and still are very much en vogue (even though weare on the brink of the next millennium). Parallel to public interest there was also an increase in academic writing. Numeroussociological and psychological studies endeavoured to explore the roots ofmasculinity and examined the mechanisms of its functions in cultures depending ofvarious kinds of gender division. They concluded that masculinity has no fixedconcept, that masculinity is not just what a group of men happen to do. Rather it hasto be understood in relation to the gender role as a social practice negotiated by menand understood in relation to the gender order. So one should instead speak of masculinities if one wants to grasp the different representations of maleness insociety. Feminists and multiculturalists have repeatedly criticised the dominant genderposition of men in society and questioned the legitimacy for patriarchy. They askedfor a new man , a new social understanding of male values and attitudes and askedfor change. Since the mid-1970s men responded to the call for change, exploredaspects of men s lives and started to question whether the traditional concept (aconcept that is still very much practised by men throughout the Western world) ofmale domination is still irreproachable. This, however, also sparked off a crisis,indeed a dilemma because many men felt that, without a fixed basis to definethemselves they lost their bearings. Bearing this in mind it is an interesting questionto ask in what way men represent men so the task of my thesis is to find out whatkind of men are presented in Alan HOLLINGHURST's The Swimming Pool Library,Irvine WELSH's Trainspotting and Nick HORNBY's High Fidelity and whatrelationships to other men and women the authors form. I chose this combination of novels and authors for a number of reasons. The novelsare all contemporary works of fiction, in a publicational time span from 1988-1995,making them fictional works written at the peak of masculinity research and the socialquestioning of masculine concepts. Male characters and their authors come from different social backgrounds and thus promise interesting aspects, which take power,class and sexual orientation into consideration. [...]