After several years of hard work, I’m delighted to say that Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature, edited by myself and Amelia Yeates, will be published by Ashgate very shortly. With excellent contributors and taking an innovative approach to Pre-Raphaelitism, we are really excited about this book!

Drawing on recent theoretical developments in gender and men’s studies, Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities shows how the ideas and models of masculinity were constructed in the work of artists and writers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Paying particular attention to the representation of non-normative or alternative masculinities, the contributors take up the multiple versions of masculinity in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings and poetry, masculine violence in William Morris’s late romances, nineteenth-century masculinity and the medical narrative in Ford Madox Brown’s Cromwell on His Farm, accusations of ‘perversion’ directed at Edward Burne-Jones’s work, performative masculinity and William Bell Scott’s frescoes, the representations of masculinity in Pre-Raphaelite illustration, aspects of male chastity in poetry and art, Tannhäuser as a model for Victorian manhood, and masculinity and British imperialism in Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the far-reaching effects of the plurality of masculinities that pervade the art and literature of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Contents:
Introduction: Pre-Raphaelite masculinities in context, Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge;
‘How grew such presence from man’s shameful swarm’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Victorian masculinity, Jay D. Sloan;
William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and the parameters of manliness, Ingrid Hanson;
The hallucination of the real: Pre-Raphaelite vision as a crisis of Romantic masculinity, Gavin Budge;
Health and manliness in the reception of Edward Burne-Jones’s work, Amelia Yeates;
Marginal masculinities? Regional and gender borders in William Bell Scott’s Wallington scheme, Rosemary Mitchell;
Interpreting masculinity: Pre-Raphaelite illustration and the Works of Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and Trollope, Simon Cooke;
‘Me, who ride alone’: male chastity in Pre-Raphaelite poetry and art, Dinah Roe;
In praise of Venus: Victorian masculinity and Tannhäuser as aesthetic hero, Sally-Anne Huxtable;
Christianity, masculinity, imperialism: The Light of the World and colonial contexts of display, Eleanor Fraser Stansbie;
Afterword, Colin Cruise;
Bibliography; Index.

Find out more or buy it here.