Men Beyond Desire (PDF)

a critic like David Greven as a guide to the very serious ideas about gender roles contained in our national literature, and the sometimes frightening implications that these ideas continue to hold for all of us." - Gay and Lesbian Review (September/October 2006 issue)

"In this provocative and often penetrating examination of the American self-made man, desperate to maintain his inviolability in the face of compulsory demands for heterosexual marriage and homosocial fraternal camaraderie, David Greven explores the creation of and the resulting consequences for this male icon as embodied in such literary characters as Natty Bumppo and Ichabod Crane, Fanshawe and Billy Budd, Roderick Usher and Miles Coverdale, Arthur Dimmesdale and Uncle Tom . . .Greven probes, suggests, and points out multi-layered ambiguities within the texts . . .a lively and unsettling book that, as all good criticism does, forces us to see what we took to be familiar as, in many cases, radically unfamiliar. . . . You come away from this book convinced that it has plumbed the darker depths of American culture." - The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review"Greven brings a great deal of erudition, spirit, and interpretive subtlety to a task that has inherent difficulties, since he is required to read behind the surface of fiercely maintained defense mechanisms to the male distresses they are meant to conceal. Men Beyond Desire is a gallant successor to G. J. Barker-Benfield s The Horrors of the Half-Known Life [that] casts light on confused questions." - Men and Masculinities"A summary cannot do justice to Greven s tenacious and often brilliant readings. His observations on 'fraternalist bias' within contemporary criticism and theory are particularly provocative, as is his emphasis on the violence perpetrated against non-normative figures. Although the inviolate male s resistance has heroic aspects, his isolation is frequently disturbing; the book is far from a paean to American individualism . . .a valuable and engaging contribution to recent work on gender and antebellum literature." - Journal of American Studies

"There is much to value in Greven's work. Beyond the strong readings, of Irving and Hawthorne in particular, and beyond the keen sense it shows of the collision between Jacksonian ideals of the self-made man and reformist insistences on purity and sentimental propriety, the book offers a bracing take on the dynamics of male intimacies in the nineteenth century, one that recognizes the presence of a variety of sentimental modes but insists too on the rivalry, fear, violence, and enmity that made the world of homosociality no less perilous, for the sexually nonnormative, than the world of reproductive heterosexuality." - Studies in American Fiction