Iron John

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Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell

"This volume explores what it means for an African to be masculine and how male identity is shaped by cultural forces. The editors believe that to tackle the important questions in Africa - the many forms of violence (wars, genocides, familial violence, and crime) and the AIDS pandemic - it is necessary to understand how a combination of a colonial past, patriarchal cultural structures, and a variety of religious and knowledge systems creates masculine identities and sexualities. The work done in the book particularly bears in mind how vulnerability and marginalization produce complex forms of male identity. The book is interdisciplinary and is the first in-depth and comprehensive study of African men as a gendered category."--BOOK JACKET.

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William Nicholson

A young man embarks on an aimless journey, hitchhiking across Europe without planned destinations, only to find himself caught up in a confusing, threatening, and surreal world of inexplicable violence and dark secrets.

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Susan Reid

Twelve contributors bring academic theories relating to child development to life in this revealing study. Areas covered include: intergenerational child-rearing, nurture and nature, and the origins of emotional disturbance.

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Jill Campbell

Examining Henry Fielding's sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, Natural Masques breaks with old critical commonplaces that contrast Fielding's "masculinity" with Samuel Richardson's "feminine" sensibilities. It argues that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered identity appears throughout Fielding's writings, and that Fielding shared that preoccupation with his contemporaries. It therefore offers an argument about Fielding's period as well as about his major works, which are analyzed in connection with a variety of related texts - from satires on the castrati to educational treatises, Whig propaganda, and debates in political theory. Approaching gender as a complex system of relations, Campbell investigates Fielding's treatments of masculine and feminine identities across the arenas of eighteenth-century political, social, and literary conflict and change. The plays with which Fielding began his literary career are particularly explicit concerning his interest in problems of gender. Some of their most recurrent satiric targets - domineering women, castrato singers, beaux - disrupt the expected economy of sexual roles, and Fielding's productions of his own plays often featured the dramatic spectacle of this disruption, with men cast in women's roles, and women in men's. In the opening scenes of Joseph Andrews, Fielding frames his parodic response to Pamela by reversing the sexes of the two participants in Richardson's scenario of embattled chastity. Campbell shows how throughout Fielding's writings, the suspicion that sexual roles are merely assumed - and therefore subject to alteration and appropriation - intimates a more general possibility that personal identity is always in some sense impersonated, incoherent, mutable. . Campbell draws on recent work that sees the eighteenth century as a crucial moment in the history of sexuality and gender, and she critiques new treatments of the novel's function in defining domestic femininity.