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Heterosexual Masculinities and the Self-Reflexive Novel

Rossoni, Stefano; (2025) Heterosexual Masculinities and the Self-Reflexive Novel. [Book]. Comparative Literature and Culture. UCL Press: London, UK. Green open access

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Abstract

Heterosexual Masculinities and the Self-Reflexive Novel examines how the narratives of four world-renowned authors, namely J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and Mario Vargas Llosa, offer a standpoint through which to address the inscription of heterosexual masculinity into Western literary legacy and the ways in which masculinity is re-fashioned in contemporary self-reflexive novels. Considering the interconnectedness of their narratives for the first time, the book explores unexamined patterns of dialogue among Coetzee, Kundera, Roth and Vargas Llosa while also contextualising their writing in the light of the European literary tradition inaugurated by Cervantes’s Don Quixote and continued by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Rather than building on conventional theoretical approaches to literary studies, Stefano Rossoni develops a fresh and engaging approach by looking at these two works not only as narrative texts but most importantly as theories of literature. In dialogue with critical contributions that examined men’s emotional illiteracy and struggle to develop a language for self-reflection, the book argues that the narratives of Coetzee, Kundera, Roth and Vargas Llosa engage with the tradition of the self-reflexive novel and its ramifications to reflect on masculinity as a socio-cultural construction. Ultimately, their writing reveals men's novelistic self-reflexivity as a site of unintelligibility.

Type: Book
Title: Heterosexual Masculinities and the Self-Reflexive Novel
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800088771
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088771
Language: English
Additional information: © Author, 2025 Any third-party material in this book is not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use provided author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Attribution should include the following information: Rossoni, S. 2025. Heterosexual Masculinities and the Self-Reflexive Novel. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088771
Keywords: masculinity, novel, gender studies, comparative literature
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > SELCS
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10211067
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