Titlebook: White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature; Tim Engles Book 2018 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

IVORY

抱怨

White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature978-3-319-90460-3

insincerity

Alcove

Introduction: Making America White Male Again,agnoses of the contemporary white male psyche, demonstrating that a hyper-individualized masculine identity is ironically grounded in the collective subjugation of others and that white male nostalgia commonly takes at least five different forms.

Ordeal

,Ethnicized White Male Nostalgia: Sloan Wilson’s ,mounts to a wealthy, socially eminent, and ethnically specific familial past. This chapter also demonstrates that in creating literary foils for his protagonist, Wilson deployed markedly ethnic characters who amount to caricatured iterations of (following Toni Morrison) a literary “ethnicist presence.”

nauseate

,Moralizing White Male Nostalgia: Richard Wright’s ,holarly interest in Wright’s novel by reading its visceral excesses as an allegorical satire on its era’s collective white male emotions, including their grounding in nostalgia and relationally constructed morality. Wright satirizes both ironically immoral white supremacy and postwar white male longings for an earlier social eminence.

星星

,Spatialized White Male Nostalgia: Carol Shields’s ,h a “masculinist and colonial spatiality.” While Shields expresses hope that unwittingly domineering white men can learn to treat others more equitably, she also dramatizes the common white male tendency to conceive of socio-geographic space in fantasized, self-constituting terms.

DUCE

,Denying White Male Nostalgia: Don DeLillo’s ,o domineering white masculinity; and the nostalgic longings commonly provoked in white men by such challenges. DeLillo also counters white masculine dominance and solipsistic nostalgia with numerous figurations of female and non-white artists, whose communally inclined art repeatedly promotes human connections.

obligation

,Possessive White Male Nostalgia: Louis Begley’s ,nd ethnoracially subordinated others. Begley suggests the personal costs of stubborn adherence to white supremacist patriarchal ideology and that a common reaction among the era’s entitled, middle-aged white men was to reflect nostalgically on earlier times in which their possessive tendencies did not seem under fire.

喃喃而言

,Epilogue: Margaret Atwood’s , and the Futures of Domineering White Masculinity,stem” remains “central to most western societies.” Literary fiction can illustrate and inspire effective resistance, and the six novels considered in this study demonstrate the healing potential of narrative itself, exposing as it often does the interior machinations of the empowered and thereby suggesting avenues toward more egalitarian futures.