In four long British poems written in the latter half of the 19th century, Machann (English, Texas A&M U.) teases out and analyzes the trait of behaving in ways thought to be typical and
appropriate for males. Questions of gender were important to all the poets, he says, and the topic of masculinity is central to the modern understanding of Victorian literature's major themes,
its idealism and social criticism, and its perplexities and uncertainties. He discusses Arthur and manly codes of behavior in Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
construction of masculinity in Aurora Leigh, ambivalent Victorian manhood in Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage, and Robert Browning's Chivalrous Christianity in The Ring and the Book.
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