Men and feminism in modern literature

Accepting the contention of feminists that the New Woman is here to stay, Declan Kibertd asks what kind of man will emerge as a response to the challenge which she poses. Although he finds some answers in the contemporary literature of women's liberation, it is perhaps surprisingly the leading male writers of the period 1890 to 1920 who provide more answers about the New Man. The problem faced by these writers was acute--how to create a woman who was both imperious and admirable, a man who was at once passive and exemplary. The boyish girls of Shakespeare's comedies had been unfailingly charming, but his womanly men had been exposed as public failures or moral weaklings. By the late nineteenth century, the passive male was a hero of Arnold and Tennyson, but the manly woman had come to be seen as a dark destroyer.^ ^^Separate chapters are devoted to the work of Strindberg, Ibsen and Hardy, three men who charted the rise of the New Woman, but the main section of the book traces the emergence of the New Man in the writings of Yeats, Lawrence and Joyce. These three authors have been repeatedly denounced by contemporary feminists, but are here shown to have been sexual radicals whose ad