Perverse Feelings: Poe and American Masculinity

Perverse Feelings: Poe and American Masculinity explores white masculinity in Poe's fiction and the culture it represents, revealing the pathologies of American masculinity through a reckoning with its perverse feelings. It asks what masculinity feels in different historical contexts and what it can teach us about contemporary white American masculinity.

Format: Hardback
Length: 234 pages
Publication date: 15 October 2022
Publisher: Lexington Books

Perverse Feelings: Poe and American Masculinity delves into the exploration of white masculinity within the realm of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction and the cultural context it encapsulates. Within Poe's narratives, his male characters are plagued by chronic illness, aberrant attachments, and repugnant emotions, leading to a profound examination of the pathologies that emerged within American masculinity throughout a turbulent history marked by imperialism, capitalism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia.

One of the central assertions of this book is that a deeper understanding of past and present American masculinity can be attained by confronting and grappling with its perverse feelings. More specifically, it poses the following questions: What does masculinity feel? What does white American masculinity feel in the early decades of nation-building? What emotions torment and beset Poe's male characters? And what insights can these feelings offer us regarding the antagonisms prevalent in contemporary white American masculinity?

Through meticulous analysis and thoughtful interpretation, Perverse Feelings: Poe and American Masculinity sheds light on the complex and often contradictory emotions that shape the male characters in Poe's works, providing a valuable contribution to the study of literature, masculinity, and the broader socio-cultural landscape of early America.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781793626523