Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Fiction »

Axel Nissen is professor of American literature at the University of Oslo and the author of several books, including Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper.

The modern idea of Victorians is that they were emotionless prudes, imprisoned by sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection only within the bounds of matrimony—if at all. And yet, a wealth of evidence contradicting this idea has been hiding in plain sight for close to a century. In Manly Love, Axel Nissen turns to the novels and short stories of Victorian America to uncover the widely overlooked phenomenon of passionate friendships between men.

Nissen’s examination of the literature of the period brings to light a forgotten genre: the fiction of romantic friendship. Delving into works by Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and others, Nissen identifies the genre’s unique features and explores the connections between romantic friendships in literature and in real life. Situating love between men at the heart of Victorian culture, Nissen radically alters our understanding of the American literary canon. And with its deep insights into the emotional and intellectual life of the period, Manly Love also offers a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century America’s attitudes toward love, friendship, marriage, and sex.

Choice

"Nissen combines historical contextualization with fresh readings of the novels'' identity formations and cultural work in reflecting and defining acceptable masculine intimacies across the homo-social/homosexual divide. In so doing, he offers new angles on familiar texts and the cultural myths that surround them."--Choice

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1   What’s the Story? The Fiction of Romantic Friendship, Part I

2   Odds ’n’ Ends: The Fiction of Romantic Friendship, Part II

3   Sex and the City: Cecil Dreeme and the Antebellum Sex/Gender System

4   Compulsory Domesticity: Roderick Hudson, Love, and Friendship in the Gilded Age

5   How the Other Half Loved: A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter in the Company of Women

6   A Tramp at Home: Huckleberry Finn, Romantic Friendship, and the Homeless Man

7   The Other Man: Homofiliation, Marriage, and A Hazard of New Fortunes

Abbreviations         Notes  

Bibliography         Index