From the Delivered to the Dispatched

Harriet Stilley teaches American Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests focus on masculinity in late twentieth-century American fiction. Harriet’s work has been published in a number of American, British and European journals, including the Cormac McCarthy Journal, the Journal of American Studies, the European Journal of American Studies, and the European Journal of American Culture.

• AbstractAcknowledgementsIntroduction1 "The land that he saw looked like a paradise. It was not, he knew."Suburbia and the Maladjusted American Male in John Cheever’s Bullet Park 2 "This-here river don’t go nowhere." Fraudulent Frontiers and the Failure of the Adamic Archetype in James Dickey’s Deliverance 3 "A violence born of total helplessness."Jane, Dick and the Deterministic Denial of the Black American Male in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye 4 "White pussy is nothin but trouble." Death, Desire and the Displacement of the Feminine Body in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God 5 "They were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be?"Martial Camouflage, Containment and Castration in Michael Herr’s Dispatches Conclusion: "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT"American Masculinity Since 1977 Works CitedIndex

This book is a valuable and innovative contribution both to masculinity studies and to the understanding of American fiction. It is a book that encourages us to look again at canonical authors from a fresh perspective, and to pay better attention to novels that have been unduly neglected. The ideas about masculinity here have a strong contemporary resonance, while being grounded in excellent close readings of the fiction of the 1970s.-- Dr Kenneth Millard, The University of Edinburgh This is a politically sophisticated study of the cultural production of American masculinities in a time of social and political turbulence and rapid change. This book offers a fresh perspective on the development of masculinities in the American 1970s, and the post-Sixties, post-Vietnam, and ultimately post-Fordist shocks that the United States experienced during that decade. Considering key writers and texts from the period, this study offers a timely analysis of the constructions of masculinity during a period of social and economic upheaval.-- Dr Brian Baker, Lancaster University, UK