In the view of David Leverenz, such nineteenth-century American male writers as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were influenced more profoundly by the popular model of the entrepreneurial "man of force" than they were by their literary precursors and contemporaries. Drawing on the insights of feminist theory, gender studies, psychoanalytical criticism, and social history, Manhood and the American Renaissance demonstrates that gender pressures and class conflicts played as critical a role in literary creation for the male writers of nineteenth-century America as they did for the women writers.
Leverenz interprets male American authors in terms of three major ideologies of manhood linked to the social classes in the Northeast-patrician, artisan, and entrepreneurial. He asserts that the older ideologies of patrician gentility and of artisan independence were being challenged from 1820 to 1860 by the new middle-class ideology of competitive individualism. The male writers of the American Renaissance, patrician almost without exception in their backgrounds and self-expectations, were fascinated yet horrified by the aggressive materialism and the rivalry for dominance they witnessed in the undeferential "new men." In close readings of the works both of well-known male literary figures and of then popular authors such as Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Francis Parkman, Leverenz discovers a repressed center of manhood beset by fears of humiliation and masochistic fantasies. He discerns different patterns in the works of Whitman, with his artisan's background, and Frederick Douglass, who rose from artisan freedom to entrepreneurial power. Emphasizing the interplay of class and gender, Leverenz also considers how women viewed manhood. He concludes that male writers portrayed manhood as a rivalry for dominance, but contemporary female writers saw it as patriarchy. Two chapters contrast the work of the genteel writers Sarah Hale and Caroline Kirkland with the evangelical works of Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
A bold and imaginative work, Manhood and the American Renaissance will enlighten and inspire controversy among all students of American literature, nineteenth-century American history, and the relation of gender and literature.

Manhood and the American Renaissance

Literature & Fiction

Leverenz, David

United States

Cornell University Press

Paternalism Incorporated: Fabies of American Fatherhood 1865-1940

Between the Civil War and World War I, David Leverenz maintains, the corporate transformation of American work created widespread desire for upward mobility along with widening class divisions. In his view, several significant narrative constructs, notably the daddy’s girl and the daddy’s boy, emerge at the intersection between paternalist practices and more democratic possibilities for self-advancement. From Mark Twain’s Laura Hawkins in The Gilded Age to the protagonist of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Willa Cather’s Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!, Leverenz finds that the image of the daddy’s girl constrains the emerging threat of the career woman even as it articulates the lure of upward mobility for women. In surveying the figure of the "daddy’s boy," Leverenz examines tensions between young men’s desires for upward mobility and older men’s desires for paternal control. Paternalism Incorporated also addresses yearnings for individualism and paternalism in various critiques of the emerging corporation. Another chapter links honor and shaming to race in the philanthropic practices of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, framed with narratives by William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, and Jane Addams. After showing how a daddy’s girl becomes a paternalist in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Leverenz considers F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night as paternalism’s elegy, contrasted with the Shirley Temple film The Little Colonel.

Paternalism Incorporated: Fables of American Fatherhood, 1865-1940

History & Criticism

The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History

Rutgers Univ Pr

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