Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature

Writing in the tradition of Leslie Fiedler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, David Greven offers a sweeping reassessment of American masculinity in the antebellum period. Greven's figure of the "inviolate male" of the period's literature - sexually and emotionally unavailable to women or other men - was a complex response to the competing, often incoherent pressures on men in the era. Lesbian desire, argues Greven, emerged through similar patterns of sexual inviolability. Carefully re-examining such important works as Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Cooper's Leatherstocking novels, Poe's tales, Hawthorne's novels, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and later works such as Macaria, The Grandissimes, Native Son, and Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, this spirited study offers a penetrating account of male sexuality as the chief cultural and social battleground for a volatile and uneasy nation.