Masculine Style

This book argues for the importance of 'cowboy masculinity,' from late nineteenth-century dime novels, to the writings of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, and Owen Wister, and analyzes the democratic politics of masculinity in American literature and positions the American West as central to modernism.

"Worden's Masculine Style is an astute, compellingly argued, appealingly offbeat, and innovative study of its subject that will make an exciting contribution to Americanist literary studies. Worden's argument, broadly speaking, is that the roots of American literary modernism - an aesthetic period that we associate with the early twentieth century, and with the famous authors Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Stein - lie in the dime novel western genre that flourished, commercially though not in terms of critical appreciation, in the late nineteenth century. Worden makes the bracing argument that the dime novel's various forms of gendered play inform literary modernism, and the valences he explores between the earlier, repudiated genre forms and the later, critically valorized period are illuminating and interesting." - David Greven, associate professor of English, Connecticut College and author of Men Beyond Desire and Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

"Masculine Style is that rarest of books, an elegantly sustained set of readings that establish compelling and lasting connections between areas of study not commonly talked about in the same breath. Through the lens of gender analysis, Worden expertly recognizes the contribution of genre narratives from and about the American West in the formal and ideological contours of literary Modernism." - Nicolas S. Witschi, author of Traces of Gold: California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature

"Worden incisively demonstrates that the distance from dime-novel westerns to high literary modernism is much shorter than anyone had supposed. Masculine Style combines brilliant rethinking of 'cowboy masculinity' - as supple, unruly, and central to U.S. writers from the Civil War to the Cold War - dazzling re-readings of individual texts, and convincing challenges to conventional cultural hierarchies, literary periods, and field demarcations. This book is a game changer." - Christine Bold, author of Selling the Wild West

Daniel Worden is teaches in the School of Individualized Study at the Rochester Institute of Technology, USA.