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COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University
Ellen Brinks. Gothic Masculinity: Effeminacy and the Supernatural in English and German Romanticism. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003. Pp. 219. $44.50.
Gothic Masculinity explores the collapsed boundaries between masculinity and femininity that the Gothic exposes, and it argues that the masculine subjectivity that Gothic seemingly privileges is a negative one, identified with effeminacy, homosexuality, and deviance. The poetic tales of British poets John Keats, Lord Byron, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the psycho-sexual writings of G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, and William Fliess reveal a Romantic subjectivity imperiled in a double-bind of gender norms maintained by discipline and challenged by transgression characterized as the Gothic. Hegel's and Freud's readings of the gothic mind bookend the literary analysis that is the heart of Gothic Masculinity. Brinks's study establishes Phenomenology of Mind as a narrative about the emergence of Hegelian/Romantic subjectivity. It is the spectral tropes of The Phenomenology of Mind that suggest Hegel's gothic and negative subjectivity, a dialectical being in opposition to the positive masculine subject who asserts his claim to the possessions of cultural property. Trapped in a genre given to real or symbolic dispossession, the masculine subject struggles to "give up...
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