Homo Americanus ERNEST HEMINGWAY, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, AND QUEER MASCULINITIES

Though separated by only eleven years in age, Hemingway and Williams seem literary generations apart. Yet both authors bridged their modernist/postmodernist divide through mutual examinations of the polemics behind heteromasculinity, Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises and Williams in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This book explores the two works many sociopolitical, literary, and intertextual ties, in particular how the conclusion of one echoes that of the other, not just in its irony but also in its implication of the audiences participation in engendering the social rules responsible for the protagonists struggle to negotiate his sexual identity. Hemingways Sun shares more with Williamss Cat than just a similar ending, however. Both works explore more broadly the construction of a queer masculinity, where the parameters that define masculinity and sexuality grow as unstable and irresolute as the frontier during a war or the line of scrimmage during a football game.

John S. Bak is Professor of American Literature at Nancy-Universit in France, where he teaches courses in translation, literary journalism, American drama, and the American gothic. A former Fulbright scholar to the Czech Republic, he took degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana (AB), Ball State University (MA, PhD), and the Sorbonne in Paris (post-doctoral habilitation). His articles have appeared in such journals as Theatre Journal, Mississippi Quarterly, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Tennessee Williams Annual Review, American Drama, Journal of Religion and Theatre, and South Atlantic Review. His edited books include Post/modern Dracula (2007), New Selected Essays: Where I Live by Tennessee Williams (2009), and International Literary Journalism: Historical Traditions and Transnational Influences (2010).