Dandies and Desert Saints
Styles of Victorian Masculinity

James Eli Adams (Author)

9780801430176

Hardback, published 7 December 1995

264 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.907 kg

Offers a rich and complex argument.... Builds on important work by Victorianists such as Linda Dowling, Norma Clarke, and Herbert Sussman, and is as much at home with Walter Houghton as with Michel Foucault. By foregrounding issues of gender and placing these ideas in a more precise social and historical context than is usual, Dandies and Desert Saints deepens and expands the discussion of masculinities in the Victorian period.

A Choice "Outstanding Academic Book for 1996"While drawing on work in feminism, queer theory, and cultural history, Dandies and Desert Saints challenges scholars to rethink simplistic notions of Victorian manhood. James Eli Adams examines masculine identity in Victorian literature from Thomas Carlyle through Oscar Wilde, analyzing authors who identify the age's ideal of manhood as the power of self-discipline. What distinguishes Adams's book from others in the recent explosion of interest in masculinity is his refusal to approach masculinity primarily in terms of "patriarchy" or "phallogocentrism" or within the binary of homosexualities and heterosexualities.