Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-De-Siècle Contributor(s): Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne (Author) |
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ISBN: 0801484502 ISBN-13: 9780801484506 Publisher: Cornell University Press OUR PRICE: $44.50 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: June 1998 Annotation: Author/scholar Suzanne Stewart argues that late 19th- and early 20th-century male masochism was a rhetorical strategy through which men asserted their cultural and political authority paradoxically by embracing the notion that they were (and always had been) wounded and suffering. |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Men's Studies - Social Science | Gender Studies - Psychology | Human Sexuality (see Also Social Science - Human Sexuality) |
Dewey: 306.776 |
LCCN: 98-15731 |
Series: Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry |
Physical Information: 0.63" H x 6.03" W x 8.99" (0.72 lbs) 240 pages |
Themes: - Chronological Period - 1851-1899 - Chronological Period - 20th Century - Cultural Region - Germany - Sex & Gender - Masculine |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: When Heinrich Heine left his sick bed in 1848 and stumbled to the Louvre to fall before a statue of the goddess of beauty and lie in the pitying, cold glance she seemed to cast on his prostrate body, he defined a recurring motif of the second half of the nineteenth century, according to Suzanne R. Stewart. Directing her attention to the voice of the shriveled male body at beauty's feet, she investigates the discourse by and about men that took hold in the German-speaking world between 1870 and 1940 and that articulated masculinity as and through its own marginalization. Male masochism, she suggests, was a rhetorical strategy through which men asserted their cultural and political authority paradoxically by embracing the notion that they were (and always had been) wounded and suffering. Stewart demonstrates and develops her contentions through close readings of the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Richard Wagner, and Sigmund Freud, in each case showing that the very act through which men sacrificed themselves to women comprised the essence of the new male subject deeply penetrated by relations of political and sexual power. Masochistic scenarios, whether in literature, music, the visual arts, or medicalized diagnoses of the fin-de-si cle malaise, stage the male as one who submits, as Stewart explains, to an aestheticized and eroticized gaze and voice. |
Contributor Bio(s): Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne: - Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies at Brown University. |