Stunted Lives, Stagnant Economies
Poverty, Disease, and Underdevelopment
Peer Power
Preadolescent Culture and Identity
Acting in Concert
Music, Community, and Political Action
Monumental Anxieties
Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in 19-th Century U.S. Literature
Recent gender-based scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature has established male authors' crucial awareness of the competition from popular women writers. And critical work in gay studies and queer theory has stressed the importance in canonical American literature of homoerotic relations between men, even before "homosexuality" became codified at the end of the century. Scott Derrick draws on these insights to explore the ways in which male authors struggle to refigure literature-historically devalued as feminine-as a masculine and heterosexual enterprise. Derrick focuses on scenes of compositional crisis that reveal how male identity itself is at risk in the perils and possibilities of being a male author in a feminized literary marketplace.