Manly Love
Romantic Friendship in American Fiction
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 What’s the Story? The Fiction of Romantic Friendship, Part I
2 Odds ’n’ Ends: The Fiction of Romantic Friendship, Part II
3 Sex and the City: Cecil Dreeme and the Antebellum Sex/Gender System
4 Compulsory Domesticity: Roderick Hudson, Love, and Friendship in the Gilded Age
5 How the Other Half Loved: A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter in the Company of Women
6 A Tramp at Home: Huckleberry Finn, Romantic Friendship, and the Homeless Man
7 The Other Man: Homofiliation, Marriage, and A Hazard of New Fortunes
Abbreviations Notes
Bibliography Index
“This is the most interesting and original study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture that I have read in years. In the wake of Manly Love, the field will never look quite the same. Nissen has trumped nearly every other scholar in recapturing and elucidating some fundamental patterns of American Victorian culture. His engaging, even suspenseful, book transported me into those times more fully than anything I know from outside the period itself, such that his insights attain an emotional as well as intellectual force. This book deserves a sustained standing ovation.”
“Manly Love uncovers amazing examples of male romantic friendship in literary classics as well as in hitherto lost literary gems. It is the first comprehensive history of love between men as it was reflected in nineteenth-century American fiction. Axel Nissen engagingly and definitively challenges the historical amnesia which assumes that the transatlantic uproar over the Oscar Wilde case represented the whole story of the American Victorian response to male homoeroticism.”
History: American History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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