By Axel Nissen
The smooth notion of Victorians is they have been impassive prudes, imprisoned by means of sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection simply in the bounds of matrimony—if in any respect. And but, a wealth of facts contradicting this concept has been hiding in undeniable sight for on the subject of a century. In Manly Love, Axel Nissen turns to the novels and brief tales of Victorian the United States to discover the commonly ignored phenomenon of passionate friendships among men.
Nissen’s exam of the literature of the interval brings to gentle a forgotten style: the fiction of romantic friendship. Delving into works via Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and others, Nissen identifies the genre’s designated good points and explores the connections among romantic friendships in literature and in actual existence. Situating love among males on the middle of Victorian tradition, Nissen notably alters our figuring out of the yank literary canon. And with its deep insights into the emotional and highbrow lifetime of the interval, Manly Love additionally deals a clean viewpoint on nineteenth-century America’s attitudes towards love, friendship, marriage, and sex.
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