Hard-Boiled Masculinities

Strips the veneer of the tough guy in modern American culture

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 its cultural conception. Examining the work of Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, and William Faulkner, Breu illustrates how the tough male was a product of cultural fantasy, one that shored up gender and racial stereotypes.
Christopher Breu is assistant professor of English at Illinois State University.

Christopher Breu makes a strong and passionate case for taking popular literature seriously as a repository of the collective fantasies about gender, sexuality, and race that bind us to repetitions of stereotypes.

—

Catherine Nickerson, Emory University

Title:	Hard-Boiled Masculinities
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Author:	Christopher Breu
Edition:	Paperback
Language:	English
ISBN:	0816644349
EAN:	9780816644346