Women Constructing Men Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750 - 2000

Female novelists have always invested as much narrative energy in constructing their male characters-heroes and villains-as they have in envisioning their female protagonists, but this fact has received very little scholarly attention to date. In Women Constructing Men, scholars from Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States begin to sketch the outline of a new literary history of women writing men in the English-speaking world from the eighteenth century until today. By rediscovering forgotten texts, rereading novels by high-canonical female authors, refocusing the interest in well-known novels, and analyzing contemporary narrative constructions of masculinity, the contributing scholars demonstrate that female authors create male characters every bit as complex as those of male authors.

Sarah S. G. Frantz is assistant professor of English at Fayetteville State University. Katharina Rennhak is professor of English at the Bergische Universitt Wuppertal.