By James Penner
Pinks, Pansies, and Punks charts the development of masculinity inside of American literary tradition from the Nineteen Thirties to the Seventies. Penner records the emergence of "macho criticism," and explores how debates approximately "hard" and "soft" masculinity stimulated the category struggles of the Thirties, anti-communism within the Nineteen Forties and Nineteen Fifties, and the conflict among the outdated Left and the recent Left within the Sixties. through extending literary tradition to incorporate not only novels, performs, and poetry, yet diaries, journals, manifestos, screenplays, and essays on psychology and sociology, Penner unveils the multiplicity of gender attitudes that emerge in all the a long time he addresses. (2011)
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Extra info for Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture
Sample text
In contrast to Proust’s leisure-culture body, Gold recommends a new hybrid of working-class masculinity and bold social criticism. In an essay that was written for the New Masses in 1926, Gold describes his ideal: O Life, send us a great literary critic. . It is unfashionable to believe in human progress. It is unfashionable and unsophisticated to follow in the footsteps of Tolstoi, of Dickens, Shelley, Blake, Burns, Whitman, Trotsky. Send us a critic. Send us a giant who can shame our writers back 32 Pinks, Pansies, and Punks to their task of civilizing America.
In Gold’s hypermasculine imaginary, the homosexual author reveals himself through literary refinement, decorous language, impeccable grammar, and a fondness for classical references (Wilder was a prep school teacher who taught Latin and Greek). In a column in the New Masses, Gold even goes so far as to associate “perfect English with effeminacy” (qtd. in Aaron 256). 3 By making Wilder a crude symbol of leisureculture decadence, Gold aligns himself with the muscular redskin tradition of American literary culture and suggests that Wilder’s literary milieu mystifies the true source of his class’s wealth: “[Wilder’s fiction] helps the parvenu class forget its lowly origins in American industrialism.
In The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment, Alan Sinfield persuasively argues that the public figure of Oscar Wilde is central to the creation of the stereotypical image of the homosexual in Anglo-American literary culture: “The Wilde Trials helped to produce a major shift in perceptions of the scope of single sex passion. At that point, the entire, vaguely disconcerting nexus of effeminacy, leisure, idleness, immorality, luxury, insouciance, decadence, and aestheticism, was transformed into a brilliantly precise meaning” (3).