Pinks, Pansies, and Punks The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture

"...an elegant and entertaining walk through the urban jungle of U.S. literary culture since the 1930s... casts new light on famous texts, and reveals the multiple forms of textual masculinity...and the paradoxical connections between hard and soft masculinities in U.S. public culture. ...A valuable contribution to both literary studies and gender analysis."---Raewyn Connell, author of Masculinities "James Penner takes readers on a thrilling---and, at times, unnerving---grand tour of mid-20th-century masculinities, documenting the never-ending struggle between the hard, macho man and the soft, sensitive, artistic soul. Careening between Alfred Kinsey and Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams and Eldridge Cleaver, Penner surveys an extraordinary range of novels, films, plays, and criticism to demonstrate how deeply entrenched these opposing mythologies are in American culture."---David Savran, The Graduate Center, City University of New York Pinks, Pansies, and Punks charts the construction of masculinity within American literary culture from the 1930s to the 1970s. Penner documents the emergence of "macho criticism," and explores how debates about "hard" and "soft" masculinity influenced the class struggle of the 1930s, anti-communism in the 1940s and 1950s, and the clash between the Old and New Left in the 1960s. By extending literary culture to include not just novels, plays, and poetry, but diaries, journals, manifestos, screenplays, and essays on psychology and sociology, Penner unveils the multiplicity of gender attitudes that emerge in each of the decades he addresses.