Book
Introduction: Making America White Male Again
(2018)
Abstract
This introduction situates the book’s study of six novels by American and Canadian authors amidst current scholarship on nostalgia, critical whiteness and masculinity studies, and literary white male protagonists. As demonstrated by these novels and by the central slogan in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, “Make America Great Again,” xenophobic, white nationalist appeals have long stoked white male emotions, in part by evoking a mythical past in which white male power reigned without challenge. Spanning the 1950s to the 2010s, the novels examined in White Male Nostalgia provide adept, representative diagnoses 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.
Keywords
- White Male Nostalgia,
- Nostalgia,
- Critical Whiteness Studies,
- Masculinity Studies,
- Memory Studies,
- American Literature,
- Canadian Literature
Disciplines
Publication Date
July 31, 2018
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Citation Information
Tim Engles. Introduction: Making America White Male Again. (2018) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tim_engles/52/