Greven publishes an updated second edition of his first book, Men Beyond Desire: Male Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America.
Professor David Greven has written many books during his career, but recently he returned to the book that started it all and has published an updated second edition of his first book, Men Beyond Desire: Male Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America. This book makes a crucial intervention in the way we understand male sexuality in numerous classics of American literature. Many male protagonists, Greven shows, strive not for sexual relationships or even friendship, but rather pursue the project of becoming untouched and untouchable. The depictions of inviolate men in the words he studies--by Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Stowe, and others--provide a new way of thinking about this period in American history and the way its writers depicted American masculinity.
In this expanded new edition, Greven returns to his important discussion of these texts in order to add new insights and context drawn from developments in the field of masculinity studies. The new edition also includes a new introduction and a new chapter discussing Melville's famous story, "Bartleby the Scrivener."
Reviews have come in for this second edition:
“With this second, revised, and augmented edition of Men Beyond Desire, David Greven’s invaluable study of the inviolate male becomes that rare and most welcome of critical fluid texts, offering further versions of fraught American masculinity and new insight into aggression and victimization in the fashioning, representation, and critiquing of homosociality as it evolves from the classics of antebellum literature to modernism, film, and popular culture.”
- John Bryant, Professor Emeritus of English, Hofstra University and author of Herman Melville: A Half Known Life (Wiley-Blackwell)
“With insight and lucidity, David Greven’s Men Beyond Desire revealed the ubiquity of the inviolate man, sealed off from sexual and emotional
intimacy, as American literature’s signal figure of protest against the double compulsion
of heterosexuality and homosociality. In this welcome new edition, Greven expands
and refines that groundbreaking 2005 thesis and adds a new chapter on Melville’s ‘Bartleby
the Scrivener’ in which he fully unfolds the tragedy of an inviolate masculinity that
forecloses all intimacy.”
Jennifer Greiman, Professor of English at Wake Forest University and author of Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form)
“When first published in 2005, Men Beyond Desire rapidly became a fundamental reference for students and scholars interested in sexuality
and styles of masculinities in nineteenth-century American literature. In this second,
revised edition, which confirms the long-lasting impact of Greven’s ample and erudite
study of homosociality and its discontents, the “inviolate male” finds a new counterpart
in the figure of the “victim-monster,” as additional readings of Hawthorne’s “The
Minister’s Black Veil” and Melville’s “Bartleby” brilliantly demonstrate. Especially
striking is the continuing relevance, amid the current popularity of health humanities,
of the links between antebellum US literature and health reform that Greven highlighted
in the original edition and stresses again today. In that respect, Men Beyond Desire was prescient in 2005, and continues to illuminate literary studies of gender and
sexuality twenty years later.”
Édouard Marsoin, Associate Professor of US Literature, Université Paris Cité)
Greven is the author of many essays and numerous books, including: All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and Literary Influence (2024), Maurice (2024), Ghost Faces: Hollywood and Post-Millennial Masculinity (2016), Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville (2016), and The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender(2012).