From the publisher: This book is about the modernist narrative voice and its correlation to medical, mythological, and psychoanalytic images of emasculation between 1919 and 1945. It shows how special-effects of rhetoric and form inspired by outré modernist developments in psychoanalysis, occultism, and negative philosophy reshaped both narrative structure and the literary depiction of modern masculine identity. In acknowledging early twentieth-century Anglo-American literature’s self-conscious and self-reflexive understanding of the effect of textual production, this engaging new study depicts a history of writers and readers understanding the role of textual absence in the development and chronicling of masculine anxiety and optimism.

Allan Johnson is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, UK.  He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave, 2014) and numerous articles on modernism, esotericism, gender studies, and narrative theory. He has previously taught at the University of Leeds, Birkbeck University of London, and City University of Hong Kong.

Johnson conducted research in support of Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature as a Beinecke Library Visiting Research Fellow in 2014-15.

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The Beinecke Library encourages scholars, students, and the public to engage the past in the present for the future. In the service of new scholarship, the library offers generous fellowships for visiting scholars and for graduate students to support research in a wide range of fields. Learn more about fellowship opportunities.