ABSTRACT
The chapters that follow are analyses of a certain phallic impulse in twentieth-century literature, and its effect on literary style. Feminist critics of the last two decades have often expressed their resentment of the so-called 'phallic critics' men who filter their judgments of women's writing through their own sexist preconceptions. The massive problems of sex definition, then, loom behind any analysis of male and female style. In a sense, however, the definition of sex is style. While reading the literature of the women's movement, Norman Mailer is struck by its curt sentences, its obscenities, its explosive, aggressive stance. If an author is not obsessed with masculinity throughout his career, like Yukio Mishima, he at least devotes one work to this obsession, as do Alfred Jarry, Alberto Moravia and Michel Leiris. An important shift has taken place in the nature of the masculine role; one that Virginia Woolf may have been the first to notice.
