Hard-boiled MasculinitiesThe persona of the American male in the period between the two world wars was characterized by physical strength, emotional detachment, aggressive behavior, and an amoral worldview. This ideal of a hard-boiled masculinity can be seen in the pages and, even more vividly, on the covers of magazines such as Black Mask, which shifted from Victorian-influenced depictions of men in top hats and mustaches in the early 1920s to the portrayal of much more overtly violent and muscular men. Looking closely at this transformation, Christopher Breu offers a complex account of how and why hard-boiled masculinity emerged during an unsettled time of increased urbanization and tenuous peace and traces the changes in its cultural conception as it moved back and forth across the divide between high and low culture as well as the color line that bifurcated American society. Examining the work of Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, and William Faulkner, as well as many lesser-known writers for the hypermasculine pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, Breu illustrates how the tough male was a product of cultural fantasy, one that shored up gender and racial stereotypes as a way of lashing out at the destabilizing effects of capitalism and social transformation. Christopher Breu is assistant professor of English at Illinois State University. |
Contents
HardBoiled Masculinity and the Work | 1 |
Wearing the Black Mask | 23 |
Going BloodSimple in Poisonville | 57 |
The HardBoiled Male Travels Abroad | 83 |
Freudian Knot or Gordian Knot? | 143 |
Pulp Magazine Readership and the Politics | 175 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic allegorical ambivalent becomes black masculinity Black Mask black rapist Bob's Brett central Chester Himes conception construction context crime fiction criminal critical critique cultural fantasy Dashiell Hammett detective fiction Dinah disavowal discourse dream Duke University Press dynamic economic embodied emergence ethic Faulkner femme fatale figure Film Noir gender genre gothic Hammett hard-boiled fiction hard-boiled form hard-boiled male hard-boiled masculinity hard-boiled narrative hard-boiled text Himes's fiction Hollers Let homosocial identity ideological investments Jake Jake's Joe's Light in August logic manhood mass culture melancholia melancholic modern modernist murder narration negative noir fiction noir narrative noir stories novel Op's organized passage phantasmatic political popular culture premodern produced protagonist psychological noir pulp magazines race racial borrowing reader Red Harvest relationship representation represented repudiation romance Romero sexual Slavoj Žižek social structure subjectivity suggests Sun Also Rises symbolic theory tion trans transformation true-crime urban violence white supremacy York Žižek