Lydia R. Cooper – författare

Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures.

Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures.

Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

The Western genre provides the most widely recognized, iconic images of masculinity in the United States - gun-slinging, laconic white male heroes who emphasize individualism, violence, and an idiosyncratic form of justice. This idealized masculinity has been fused with ideas of national identity and character. Masculinities in Literature of the American West examines how contemporary literary Westerns push back against the coded image of the Western hero, exposing pervasive anxieties about what it means to "act like a man." Contemporary Westerns critique assumptions about innate connections between power, masculinity, and "American" character that influence public rhetoric even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These novels struggle with the monumental challenge of all Westerns: the challenge of being human in a place where "being a man" is so strictly coded, so unachievable, so complicit in atrocity, and so desirable that it is worth dying for, worth killing for, or perhaps worth nothing at all.