Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows not only the usefulness of the interdisciplinary corpus of masculinity studies to the literary analysis, but also the relevance of literary texts to the social and political analysis of men and masculinities. It includes a wide variety of authors and texts, ranging from Herman Melville to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Martin Amis to Toni Morrison to contemporary Arab American women authors, among others. The book shows how the application of whiteness studies to this classic novella can shed new light on its representations of masculinity. It interrogates the role of the national in the creation and perpetuation of specific models of masculinity, the concept of glocalization, and the notion of transnationalization. The book discusses how frightened we are of becoming old and how, for men, the fear of growing old is usually encoded as feminine.