Overview
Contributes to the study of psychology, gender, and masculinity
Explores the archetype of the submissive son and draws on biographical and fictional sources
Utilizes analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the prime example of the submissive son
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Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book considers major male writers from the last three centuries whose relation to a strong, often distant woman—one sometimes modeled on their own mother—forms the romantic core of their greatest narratives. Myron Tuman explores the theory that there is an underlying psychological type, the sensitive son, connecting these otherwise diverse writers. The volume starts and ends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions provides an early portrait of one such son. There are chapters on other adoring sons, Stendhal, Sacher-Masoch, Scott Fitzgerald, and Turgenev, as well as on sons like Bernard Shaw and D.H. Lawrence with a different, less affectionate psychological disposition toward women. This book demonstrates how, despite many differences, the best works of all these sensitive sons reflect the deep, contorted nature of their desire, a longing that often seems less for an actual woman than for an elusive feminine ideal.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Myron Tuman was a professor of English at universities in West Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana. This work on male writers and their mothers follows earlier studies of male writers and their sons, Melville’s Gay Father, and female writers and their fathers, Don Juan and His Daughter.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Sensitive Son and the Feminine Ideal in Literature
Book Subtitle: Writers from Rousseau to Roth
Authors: Myron Tuman
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15701-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-15700-5Published: 22 May 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-15703-6Published: 15 May 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-15701-2Published: 11 May 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 269
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Comparative Literature, Literary History, Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Psychology